Glossary

The terms that appear in the handbooks, in the admin dashboard and in review meetings — explained briefly, each with the chapter that goes into detail.

The product

Appliance (box)

The machine Brane AIF runs on: a server with an AI accelerator, standing in your company's network. Every model, every piece of data and every decision stays on it unless you release something explicitly.

AI Interaction Firewall (AIF)

The product category. A classic firewall inspects network traffic; the AI Interaction Firewall inspects the content of an AI interaction before a model sees it.

Guardian

The box's inspection and decision layer. It reads every request before processing, detects personal and confidential content, applies your policies and decides: process locally, send pseudonymised to the cloud, or refuse. Operator handbook, Chapter 10.

Perimeter

The admin-dashboard screen that answers, in full sentences, what leaves this box — to whom and under which conditions. Generated from the actual settings and exportable as a dated record. Operator handbook, Chapter 12.

Processing and routing

Routing mode

The box's basic posture: Local only (nothing leaves the building), Local preferred (cloud only where needed and permitted), Cloud preferred (cloud for quality, sensitive content still local). Operator handbook, Chapter 2.

Local model

The language model running on the appliance itself. It answers everything that must not leave the building, and is the fallback whenever a cloud connection is missing or forbidden.

Fail-safe-to-LOCAL

The principle behind every doubtful case: if a check fails, times out or is uncertain, the request is processed locally — never handed to the cloud silently. Two documented exceptions are listed in the operator handbook, Chapter 12.

Conversation lock

Once a conversation contains sensitive content it stays entirely local — including the messages that follow, which on their own would be harmless. This prevents context from leaking outward piece by piece.

Cognitive Judge

The second, semantic check: a local model judges whether a request is confidential despite unremarkable individual values — because it touches your enterprise policy, for instance. Cannot be disabled.

Data protection

PII

Personally identifiable information: names, contact details, addresses, ID and tax numbers, health data and further categories. All categories are always active and cannot be switched off individually.

Pseudonymisation (token)

Detected personal values are replaced by typed placeholders before anything is sent to the cloud: Max Müller becomes <PERSON_1>, max@firma.de becomes <EMAIL_1>. The cloud provider sees the placeholder, not the value.

Rehydration

The return path: in the cloud model's answer the placeholders are locally replaced by the original values again. You read a complete text; it never went out as one.

Ephemeral mode

A storage mode without a database: messages exist only in the browser and are gone when the window closes. For HR, legal and other particularly sensitive areas. Operator handbook, Chapter 7.

Enterprise policy

Your company's own rules in ordinary language — "calculations and margins must never leave the box". The Guardian applies them to every message, in addition to the fixed PII categories. Operator handbook, Chapter 11.

Prompt injection

An attempt to smuggle instructions to the model through the text itself — hidden in an uploaded document, for instance. The box detects such patterns and treats them as a note, a warning or a refusal, depending on the setting.

Operations

Seat and stream

Seat = one named user account. Stream = one model answer running concurrently. The license tier sets both; the streams describe the capacity of the local model, not the appliance's overall load. Operator handbook, Chapter 15.

Department

The organisational unit inside the box. A department can be set to local only — then no request from its members leaves the building, regardless of the global setting.

Connector

A link to an existing system — mailbox, file store, ticketing — that the AI is allowed to pull content from. Every connector result passes the same inspection as a typed message.

Knowledge base (RAG)

Your own documents, searchable by the AI. For every question the matching passages are retrieved and given to the model — inspected before they reach it.

Air gap

Operation entirely without an internet connection. The box works in full; updates are installed on site.

Fleet management

Central administration of several boxes by AI-Z: version, health, updates. Technical operating data is transmitted, no content. Operator handbook, Chapter 10.

Audit log

The immutable record: who triggered what and when, how it was routed, which flags were set. It holds the metadata of the decision, not prompt content.

SSO

Single sign-on — logging in with the corporate account (Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta …) instead of a separate password for the box.

Zero Data Retention (ZDR)

A cloud provider's commitment not to store requests after answering them. Availability and conditions differ per provider — the overview is in the operator handbook, Chapter 13.

Data region (residency)

The rule for which region cloud requests may be processed in. On the OpenRouter path, EU in-region routing can be activated; with direct provider keys the setting has no effect. Operator handbook, Chapter 3.