ITAR-safe AI for aerospace and defence R&D
ITAR creates a fundamental constraint: any AI processing controlled technical data must ensure no deemed export occurs. Cloud AI providers with foreign national employees, international data centres, or foreign corporate ownership all create compliance concerns. Morden runs entirely on your hardware — eliminating the problem at the architecture level.
The compliance gap in AI-assisted R&D
Aerospace and defence engineers work with airframe specifications, materials datasheets, propulsion documentation, simulation outputs, and test results. These documents contain ITAR-controlled data that cannot be processed by cloud AI without risking deemed export violations. Generic offline RAG tools can search these documents, but they miss the structural relationships between components, materials, temperature ranges, and load ratings — the connections that matter when you’re making engineering decisions.
Example: Fuel system design review
An R&D engineer is evaluating new fuel types for wing design. Their corpus includes NACA/NASA reports, materials safety datasheets, CFD simulation outputs, fuel specification sheets, and test rig results. Sources have different trust levels — peer-reviewed research, manufacturer claims, internal test data. Morden’s knowledge graph captures the relationships between fuel formulations, material compatibility, temperature ranges, and structural load ratings. When the engineer asks ‘Which fuel formulations are compatible with the current wing sealant material at operating temperatures above 150°C?’, Morden traces across documents to find the answer — with citations and source quality indicators.
Where the market stands
Enterprise solutions like AirgapAI and Legion Secure AI validate demand for air-gapped AI in defence, but target $5M+ budgets and multi-year deployments. Implicit KnowledgeOS builds knowledge graphs from aerospace documentation but is cloud-based. Morden fills the gap: offline, knowledge-graph-powered, and priced for engineering teams rather than enterprise procurement cycles.
Want to see Morden work with aerospace and defence documentation? Get in touch at [email protected].