Athena Beta · Evaluation Sandbox
Every hop your data takes when you use the Athena beta, every third party involved, and the country each one sits in. Written to be handed to an agency privacy or security team without further explanation.
The Athena web application and its database run on a Contabo VPS in Sydney, Australia. Everything that requires a GPU — language model inference, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and image generation — runs on a server physically located in Prague, Czech Republic (European Union). Some models are served instead through Frontier Access, which forwards requests to third-party providers in the United States and other jurisdictions. Payment processing uses Stripe. No part of the Athena beta runs on Australian compute today.
We are including this comparison because the product's own branding uses the word "sovereign", and we do not want that word to mislead anyone during the beta.
| Layer | Today Beta | Target Roadmap |
|---|---|---|
| Web application & database | VPS, Sydney, Australia | Australian data centre |
| Language model inference | NVIDIA L40S GPU, Prague, Czech Republic (EU) | Australian GPU infrastructure |
| Frontier / fallback models | Frontier Access → third-party providers, United States and other jurisdictions | Australian-hosted models, or disabled entirely |
| Speech-to-text and text-to-speech | Same GPU server, Prague, Czech Republic (EU) | Australian GPU infrastructure |
| Image generation | Same GPU server, Prague, Czech Republic (EU) | Australian GPU infrastructure |
| Independent security assessment | None | ISO/IEC 27001, then IRAP if required by government use |
Suitable GPU capacity for the models Athena runs is not currently available to us in Australia. The Prague server is a temporary evaluation sandbox chosen for availability, not for any data protection reason. Closing this gap is precisely the problem we are talking to government about; until it is closed, we will not describe Athena as sovereign in any present-tense sense.
Audio always leaves Australia. Transcription and summarisation of recordings run on the Prague GPU server regardless of which chat model you have selected. Choosing an Aristos-hosted model does not keep audio onshore, and neither does choosing a frontier model.
If you record or upload a meeting, the audio, its transcript and the generated summary are all processed in Czechia. Do not record conversations containing classified, OFFICIAL: Sensitive or PROTECTED material, and do not record people who have not consented to being recorded — separate state and territory recording laws apply to that and are your responsibility, not ours.
These are the third parties that can receive data from the Athena beta. "Personal information" below carries its Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) meaning.
| Recipient | Purpose | Jurisdiction | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aristos GPU server (branded in-product as “Aristos Sovereign AI”) |
Language model inference | Czech Republic (EU) | Prompt contents: your messages, conversation history, stored memory entries, uploaded file text, and any personal information you choose to type in |
| GPU hosting provider (Contabo Group / VSHosting s.r.o.) |
Physical hosting of the Aristos GPU server | Czech Republic (EU) — VSHosting's own data centre, Prague-Hostivař. VSHosting s.r.o. is part of the Contabo Group (Germany). The node is inference-only: prompts are processed in memory and no application data is written to disk by Athena | Physical infrastructure only — no direct access to application data |
| Aristos voice service (Whisper speech-to-text, Kokoro text-to-speech) |
Transcription and speech synthesis | Czech Republic (EU) | Audio recordings, voice input, resulting transcripts and summaries |
| ComfyUI image service | Image generation | Czech Republic (EU) | Image prompts and any reference images you supply |
| Frontier Access | Routing to frontier models | United States and onward to provider jurisdictions | Full prompt contents for any request you send to a frontier model |
| Third-party model providers (reached via Frontier Access) |
Frontier model inference | United States and other jurisdictions, varying by model | Full prompt contents. Each provider's own terms and retention practices apply. Providers reachable through Frontier Access include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and similar; the specific set enabled for any beta cohort is configured per deployment and disclosed to participants before use |
| Stripe | Payment and credit top-up processing | United States / global | Billing name, email, payment details. Card numbers are handled by Stripe and are not stored by Athena. Not expected to be used during a government beta |
| VPS hosting provider (Contabo) | Application and database hosting | Sydney, Australia — Contabo GmbH is a German company; the physical server and all data on it remain in Sydney | Everything stored by the application, including all conversation history |
| Tailscale | Private network between the VPS and the GPU server | United States (coordination plane) | Connection metadata for the private network. Tailscale's coordination service brokers the encrypted connection; traffic between nodes is end-to-end encrypted [TO CONFIRM: whether any relay (DERP) fallback is in use, which would route encrypted traffic via Tailscale infrastructure] |
| Google Fonts | Web font delivery | United States / global CDN | Your IP address and browser user-agent when a page loads |
| Email delivery (VentraIP) | Sign-in links, password resets, notifications | Australia | Your name, email address and message content |
If you believe anything on this page is inaccurate or incomplete, please tell us at support@aristosai.com. We would rather correct this register than have an agency rely on a version of it that is wrong.