Introducing SUDO Cloud: Private AI Without the Hardware

SUDO started as a box. A private AI appliance that sits inside a firm's office and runs entirely behind the firewall, so client data never touches a third party. That box is still the flagship, and for firms with the strictest obligations it is still the right answer. But not every team is ready to put hardware in a closet on day one. So we built a second door into the same product. Say hello to SUDO Cloud.

The Problem That Created SUDO Hasn't Changed

Professional services firms cannot safely paste client material into a public cloud LLM. Attorney-client privilege, Section 7216, fiduciary duty, and the duty of confidentiality all depend on controlling where sensitive information goes. The moment a document leaves the firm and lands on a vendor's infrastructure, that control is gone. We laid out the full compliance case in an earlier piece on why professional services firms can't use cloud AI, and none of it has softened.

SUDO was our answer to that problem. Run the model on hardware the firm controls, and the disclosure question collapses, because the facts that made it a question stop being true. The data never leaves the building. That is the SUDO Box, and it remains the cleanest possible answer for the firms that need it.

What we kept hearing, though, was a second question. "I love the idea, but I am not ready to rack a server. Can I get the same thing without the hardware?" SUDO Cloud is the answer to that question.

What SUDO Cloud Actually Is

SUDO Cloud is not a shared chatbot with a privacy policy stapled to it. It is a protected, single-tenant environment running the same SUDO models you would run on the Box. Your workspace is isolated to your firm. Your prompts and outputs are not used to train any model, ours or anyone else's. Retention is something you control, not something you discover in a vendor's terms of service after the fact.

The design principle is the same one that drives the appliance: SUDO runs through your documents, not on them. The model reads what you give it to do the work in front of it, and then that material stays yours. The cloud version moves the infrastructure off your desk without changing that contract.

Box or Cloud? How to Choose

These are two paths to the same destination, and the right one depends on where a firm sits today.

Choose SUDO Box when control is non-negotiable. The appliance sits on the firm's network and runs fully offline. Zero cloud calls, zero telemetry, zero per-token fees. One capital expense buys unlimited internal use, and nothing ever crosses the firewall. For firms with the heaviest volume or the strictest obligations, the Box is still the flagship and still the answer.

Choose SUDO Cloud when you want to move now. There is no hardware to buy, install, or maintain. You can be working in minutes, scale with your usage, and keep everything inside a protected single-tenant boundary. It is the natural on-ramp for smaller teams, for pilots, and for firms that want to prove the value before committing to hardware.

The two are built to work together. Start in the Cloud and graduate to a Box when volume justifies it. Or run a Box for your most sensitive matters and use the Cloud for everything else. It is one set of models, one router, and one brand either way, so moving between them does not mean relearning the product.

The Same Models, Either Way

Whichever path you take, you get the full SUDO lineup, each tier tuned for the work rather than for generic chat:

• SUDO General for everyday drafting, summarizing, and research.
• SUDO Fast for quick, high-volume tasks where latency matters most.
• SUDO Coder for technical and document-automation work.
• SUDO Translate for multilingual matters and client communication.
• SUDO Reason for the harder analytical problems that need to think before they answer.
• SUDO Vision for reading scanned documents, exhibits, and images.

Most people never have to pick. Auto, the default, reads each request and routes it to the right model on its own, so the team gets the best fit without thinking about which engine is doing the work.

How It Stays Private

SUDO Cloud closes most of the gap that makes public cloud LLMs a non-starter. Each firm gets an isolated tenant. Nothing you send is used to train models. Logging and retention are controllable rather than opaque. For a large set of professional-services work, that is enough to move forward with confidence.

We are also honest about the tradeoff. The on-premises Box is still the strictest possible answer, because the only way to guarantee data never reaches a third party is to make sure it never leaves the building. If you want to understand exactly how that architecture works, we wrote a companion piece on how on-premises AI actually ships. SUDO Cloud is for the teams that want most of that assurance without the hardware, and a clear path to the Box when they are ready for all of it.

Getting Started

SUDO Cloud is live now at sudo.digital. There is a free tier to start, so a firm can put real work through it before spending a dollar, and paid plans that add higher monthly token allowances as usage grows. Pick Auto, paste in a task, and see how it handles your actual work.

If you are weighing a firm-wide deployment, or you already know the Box is where you need to land, reach out and we will walk through the right setup for your practice. SUDO is a Gravitas venture, which means the same team that designs and ships products for our clients is the one building it.