Sovereignty
Sovereignty is a build guarantee, not a setting.
In-country inference
Inference runs on Sky47 Ascend NPUs inside Pakistan (region pk-isb-1). Requests to the sovereign path never leave the country. The live model is qwen36-35b-a3b — a 35B model with a 128K context window, serving on a 2-card Ascend slice.
Zero external egress
Requests default to the in-country model — routing to anything else is opt-in per request, so enabling the external pool never silently moves existing traffic. Sensitive and defence traffic routes only to the in-country endpoint whatever the policy. The Sentinel Qila defence build is air-gapped: external-provider routing is compiled out of the binary, not toggled off — the code path does not exist.
The dependency nobody prices in
Frontier model capability is supplied by a small number of foreign providers, and access to it is not a technical fact — it is a commercial and political arrangement. Terms, pricing, rate limits, model availability and the export policy underneath them are all set somewhere else, and can change without notice and without appeal.
That is a switch, and someone else owns it. Most AI strategies assume it will never be thrown, because it usually isn’t — right up until the moment a policy, a sanction or a licence review makes the decision for you. A capability that can be withdrawn is not a capability you have; it is one you are renting under terms you do not control.
Sovereignty is the answer to that, not to a privacy checkbox. The point of running inference in-country, on hardware that is not export-controlled, is that no one outside the country can decide whether you still have it tomorrow.
Ascend, not export-controlled silicon
Sentinel runs on Huawei Ascend hardware, independent of the US chip restrictions that constrain regional competitors. The model, the weights and the machines are inside the country and inside the operator’s reach — which is what makes the guarantee above structural rather than contractual.
Capacity and control
- Priority: defence › paid › free.
- Every key is capped: per-key RPM limits and daily caps; no uncapped keys.
- Metered: each call is credit-metered in PKR, with guardrail checks on the sovereign path.
Governance
Sentinel Watch provides a metadata-only audit feed and a live sovereignty posture, with NPU and throughput dashboards in Grafana.