Read it in ninety seconds.
The asymmetry. Criminals run jailbroken self-hosted LLMs (WormGPT, FraudGPT, DIG AI). UK regulators and tier-2 banks cannot. Cloud LLMs are blocked by data-residency. RegTech black boxes cannot be audited. The result: 10,000+ UK correspondent-banking relationships closed since 2020, £29m in 2024 FCA AML fines, 10–40 analyst hours per EDD case.
The architecture. Aletheia (Greek ἀλήθεια: unconcealment) is a domain-tuned, on-prem-deployable LLM stack. Continual fine-tune on a curated investigative-journalism corpus that preserves citations as first-class outputs. First-order-logic-inspired evidence-gated inference controller. Air-gapped, audit-traceable, sovereign-controlled.
The novelty. The first published Compliance Refusal Index — a benchmark of ≈500 investigator-grade queries that quantifies how mainstream LLMs perform on legitimate sanctions and beneficial-ownership questions. Field-defining UK contribution. CC-BY-4.0.
The ask. £140,000 grant (70%) on £200,000 total. Six months. Single applicant, UK-only delivery, TRL 3. Phase 2 demonstrator pathway at £1m, with three to four UK financial institutions and Sovereign AI Unit alignment.
One-page infographic
Aletheia at a glance — capability gap, architecture, validation thresholds, roadmap and vital signs. Renders crisp at any zoom (vector). All data points cited in the application body.
3-slide deck (text version)
SLIDE 1 · The capability asymmetry
Criminals have better LLMs than regulators. WormGPT, FraudGPT, DIG AI families industrialise sanctions evasion. UK has no equivalent capability for lawful investigators. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation Russia case-load has grown ≈5× since 2022. The FCA imposed £29m in 2024 AML fines on UK challenger banks. Tier-2 UK challenger banks have closed 10,000+ correspondent relationships since 2020. A single EDD case still consumes 10–40 analyst hours.
SLIDE 2 · The architecture (AI is the core, hardware the substrate)
(i) Continual fine-tune on a curated investigative-journalism corpus (OFAC, OFSI, EU consolidated, FATF, OpenSanctions, ICIJ, Companies House, BAILII) — citation-preserving, provenance-tracked, CC-BY-4.0. (ii) Evidence-gated inference controller — a first-order-logic-inspired policy layer with citation, contradiction, missing-evidence and confidence gates. (iii) On-premise reference deployment — air-gapped, UK soil, UK-procurable commodity hardware, audit-traceable. (iv) Compliance Refusal Index — first published benchmark, ≈500 queries, 5 baselines vs Aletheia.
SLIDE 3 · UK exploitation and Phase 2 readiness
Channel 1 — direct on-premise licensing to UK tier-2 challenger banks. Pricing £100k–£500k perpetual + 20% maintenance. Channel 2 — white-label licensing to UK RegTech vendors (ComplyAdvantage, Quantexa, Themis, Featurespace) required to pass the Refusal Index and EU AI Act high-risk-system audit. Channel 3 — UK government procurement via Crown Commercial Service Digital Outcomes 6 to FCA, OFSI, NCA. Conservative ARR £500k–£2m by Y2; £5m+ by Y4. Phase 2 demonstrator at £1m, twelve months, two to three UK financial institutions, Sovereign AI Unit alignment.