Private AI matters.

Most people have heard of ChatGPT and Gemini. Behind the headlines are dozens of capable AI models — open-weight, specialised, regional — each with different strengths, costs, and licensing terms.

Abila ships a tested catalog of approved models, together with the on-premise appliance that runs them. An administrator chooses which models each team can use. The catalog is reviewed with each release, so the firm does not have to track the market itself.

Public chatbots draw on whatever the model was trained on, plus whatever the vendor's web-search layer surfaces this week. The user has no list of sources and no way to remove one.

Abila answers only from the documents you put on the matter. The corpus is visible, removable, and auditable. There is no background web search, no "the model also knows" channel, no unverified third-party knowledge bleeding into the answer.

Every cited passage points back to a file you uploaded. If you didn't put it in, it can't come out.

The find-and-replace defence — "we'll call them Client A, then ChatGPT is fine" — does not survive contact with the actual exposure.

The document is the data, not the name. A renamed client still leaves the deal size, jurisdiction, sector, dates, witness, counterparty, and the verbatim clause text. Aggregation re-identifies. Anonymity is a probability, not a property.

Masking is one-sided. You can rename your client. You cannot rename the bank on the other side, the regulator running the licence assessment, the counsel of record, or the property at the address. One side identified means the pair is identified.

Pseudonymisation is not anonymisation. Under UK/EU GDPR (Article 4, Recital 26), data with names replaced by tokens is still personal data. ICO and EDPB guidance is explicit. The compliance obligations don't lift — only the lawyer's intuition does.

The work product itself is confidential. "Redraft this clause" requires pasting the clause. The structure, the sequence of edits, the redlines — that is the firm's IP and the client's deal. No name mask reaches it.