Teams in public sector run on a stack assembled over thirty years — a CAD core, a meshing tool, a solver, a post-processor, a scheduling layer and a results manager. Each is a separate seven-figure renewal. The hand-offs between them are where time is lost — case setup, queue, re-mesh, comparison, memo.
Sovereign, air-gapped, ITAR-clean.
Aether deploys into environments where wires are physical and auditors are routine. Sovereign installs, air-gapped configurations, formal export-control posture — without sacrificing what one AI does across disciplines.
What Aether is actually running.
Animated snapshots of the AI work happening in public sector today. Each carries a representative metric from a customer workload, the physics the model is reasoning about, and a citation back to the discipline page.
- Sovereign deployments
Air-gapped · ITAR-clean · zero outbound traffic
- Defence engineering and national-lab work
Hypersonics · fusion · materials · biosecurity
The thing that changed.
For decades, the slow part of public sector was the iteration loop — specifying the case, queuing the solve, parsing the result, deciding what to try next. Aether collapses that loop into an autonomous agent flow. The iteration count per quarter is what compounds, not any one solve being faster.
The same foundation model serves docking, structural FEA, RTL signoff and wet-lab campaigns. Specialisation lives in the agents and the workloads — not in different models with different training data and different blind spots.
Aether doesn't ask you to drive its solvers. It plans the study, picks the method, runs the agents, validates against measured reality, and writes the memo. The work that took a senior engineer a quarter takes the model an afternoon.
We train on simulation trajectories, instrument data and design history — the substrate of the physical world. The model gets better the more reality it touches, and reality is what tells it when it's wrong.
The state of public sector today.
We work where the work is hard, the data is closed and the renewals are seven-figure. Public sector is one of those places. Here's how the discipline looks today, what the leaders are doing, and where Aether fits.
The leading teams are investing in internal platforms — wrappers around the incumbent tools, glue code, scheduling layers, a Python notebook on top. It works. But it ages badly, ties up senior engineers and doesn't compound. The best teams know they need the next layer; most don't know what it looks like.
Aether replaces the spine of that stack with a foundation model trained on simulation, instrument data and design history. The glue layer goes away. Workflows that used to live in a queue and a folder of scripts live in an autonomous agent flow. You keep the niches that work; Aether retires the middle.
The stack today.
The list below is the typical stack in this discipline. Aether replaces the spine. Niches stay where they are; we're not in the business of forcing rip-and-replace on the things that work.
The numbers customers actually saw.
Drawn from the campaigns we've run in this discipline. Each one is reproducible — the cases, scripts and configurations are documented in the research log.
What we cover in public sector.
Each workload below ships with validated benchmarks, agent traces you can read, and a pilot pattern we've run before. Many per discipline — not a wish-list.
Defense R&D
Hypersonics, signature reduction, sensor fusion — under the right export-control regime, with traces an auditor reads.
National labs
Multi-scale materials, quantum simulation, nuclear and energy work, climate modelling.
Civil & infrastructure
Hydrology, flood modelling, urban planning, grid modelling under load.
Red-team & evaluation
Continuous adversarial evaluation, with refusal corpora extended to the sovereign's own classified scenarios.
Custom training
Customer-controlled fine-tuning on data that cannot leave the environment. Apex forward-deployed engineer cleared to the sovereign's standard.
Interagency federation
Coordinated deploys across agency boundaries with policy separation; shared evaluation, separated data planes.
The full capability map.
The depth behind the six workloads above. Grouped by where the work happens — modelling, workflow, signoff, instrumentation. Every line below is a capability that exists in production today, not a roadmap promise.
Sovereign-deployed AI
Air-gapped foundation model inside your boundary. Zero outbound traffic, ITAR-clean, export-control-aware.
National-lab consortia
Multi-institution programmes sharing model weights under a sovereign deployment. Fusion, climate, materials work on one model.
Programme planning
Strategic-planning support — reasoning over multi-year programme budgets, technical risks and stakeholder positions.
Oversight & audit
IG-grade audit posture by construction. Per-run traces, signed by model version, replayable by hash.
Defence engineering
Ascent CFD, hypersonics, structural margin, electromagnetic signature — under sovereign deploy with ITAR-clean compartments.
Critical infrastructure simulation
Grid resilience, water-system modelling, advanced-reactor safety analysis. Aether as the platform for civilisational-scale planning.
Biosecurity
Refusal corpus, dual-use gating and red-team coverage on controlled-pathogen classes — at the model layer, not in a wrapper.
Public-health response
Pandemic preparedness, surveillance signal integration, and policy modelling — under sovereign and GxP-grade audit.
The specialists in the mix.
Aether coordinates these specialised agents for the workloads above. Each is independently deployable with stable contracts, but the coordination is what makes them more than a folder of scripts.
Aether does the public sector work.
We aren't building a chat surface over your existing tools. We are training a foundation model that does the work — plans the study, picks the method, runs the agents, validates the artefact, writes the report.
- 01
Plans the study
Decomposes a one-sentence brief into a DAG of agent calls and posts the plan for your approval before any compute runs.
- 02
Picks the right method
Knows when one solver suffices and when a more expensive one is required. The judgement of a senior practitioner, encoded.
- 03
Runs the work
Dozens of specialised agents execute the plan in parallel. Long runs check-point. Reversible patch sets if anything has to be undone.
- 04
Validates against reality
Cross-checks every artefact against the regression suite for that discipline: published benchmarks, your historical data, customer-validated studies.
- 05
Writes the report
Signed memos with figures, tables and the model-version hash. Ready for design review without rebuilding the deck.
- 06
Improves itself
Failed cases enter the eval corpus. Successful pilots become regression tests. The model your next study uses is better than the one this study used.
The things Aether has already done here.
Not a roadmap. Concrete results we've put in front of customers, on benchmarks you can rerun and on deployments now in production. Each one names the work, the number and where the receipts live.
- 01
Sovereign deployment shipped
Air-gapped, ITAR-clean Aether deployment with a national-lab consortium. Zero outbound traffic; weights pinned per release.
- 02
National-lab consortium
Three labs sharing model weights under a sovereign deployment. Fusion, materials and climate work on one platform.
- 03
Audit-grade traces
Per-run signed traces accepted by the agency Inspector General. Replayable by hash for the lifetime of the programme.
- 04
Critical-infrastructure simulation
Grid-resilience and water-system modelling under sovereign deploy. The model that designs the network runs on the network.
- 05
Biosecurity coverage
Refusal corpus and red-team coverage on controlled-pathogen classes validated by an external safety advisory board.
- 06
Public-health response
Pandemic-preparedness simulation with surveillance signal integration. Sovereign-deployed, GxP-grade audit out of the box.
Eight weeks from scope to signal.
We pilot first, always. The scope is one workload, the win condition is named up-front, and the comparison is co-authored with you. If we aren't better on your metric by the end of the quarter, the rest of the quarter is on us.
- 01Week 0
Scope
We sit with your engineers, name the workload that hurts, agree the comparison data, the boundary the model runs inside, and the metric we will be measured on.
- 02Weeks 1–2
Stand up
Aether deploys into your environment of choice — managed cloud, your VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped. We connect to the data we agreed on; nothing else.
- 03Weeks 3–6
Run side-by-side
Aether runs the workload in parallel with your incumbent. Every artefact carries the model version that produced it. You see every trace.
- 04Weeks 7–8
Comparison
We co-author the comparison memo. If we aren't better on the metric you picked, we say so on the same page — and the rest of the quarter is on us.
- 05Quarter 2+
Production
Production deploy with eval-gated promotion, on-call coverage, change management aligned to your release calendar. The pilot's traces become the regression suite.
Someone has already done it.
The customer below ran this exact playbook. Their numbers are public; their story is linked.
“No data, no prompts and no telemetry cross the boundary.”
Built for the regulated parts of the work.
The same workloads that make this useful are the ones with auditors, regulators and standing data boundaries. The platform is designed for that — not retrofitted for it.
Deployment
Managed cloud (SOC 2 Type II), your VPC with private networking, on-prem on your hardware, or air-gapped behind a regulator's boundary. Same runtime, your perimeter.
Data residency
Customer-VPC and on-prem deployments keep training and inference inside the boundary you set. Air-gapped deployments produce zero outbound traffic by construction.
Audit
Immutable per-run traces. GxP / 21 CFR Part 11 / ALCOA+ patterns where the regulation applies. Exportable as OpenTelemetry, SIEM events or JSONL.
Provenance
Every output is signed by the model version that produced it. Promotion through eval gates is recorded; old versions are reproducible by hash.
Capability gating
Every tool call is gated by an explicit capability the model has to request and your policy has to grant. The refusal corpus is versioned alongside the model.
Export & IP
ITAR-clean compartments, export-control gating, separation of duty. The geometry, the chemistry and the design never leave the boundary you set — period.
What ships into public sector.
Aether is the one product Apex ships. The named surfaces below are how Aether shows up in this discipline — same model, same runtime, different workloads. Each has its own page with depth: coverage, validation, replaces, pilot pattern.
- ProductAether
- ProductAether for engineering
- ProductAether for drug discovery
The questions we get most often.
If yours isn't here, send it to hello@apexworldlabs.com and we'll answer it in plain language — usually same day.
What does Aether replace in public sector?
The incumbent stack here — fragmented per-domain procurement, legacy national-lab codes, bespoke air-gapped tooling. Aether collapses them into one model and one project file, with Aether for engineering and Aether for drug discovery doing the work under one safety story.
What outcomes should we expect?
In public sector: 0 bytes (leaving the boundary); ITAR / EAR (compatible); Red-team (verified per upgrade). Scoped to your workload and measured against your own acceptance criteria, not a public benchmark.
How is this different from a copilot?
A copilot suggests text; Aether does the work. It runs the simulation, drives the instrument, taps out the chip, lands the PR. The artefacts you act on are produced by the model — not by an engineer prompting it for hints.
Do you wrap an existing LLM?
No. Aether is a foundation model we train ourselves on simulation trajectories, instrument data and design history. We don't call third-party chat APIs as part of the product.
What does the pilot cost?
Pilots are scoped to a specific workload and a specific win condition. Pricing is fixed-fee for the scope; if we aren't better on the metric by the end of the quarter, the rest of the quarter is on us.
Will it work with our existing data and tools?
Yes. Aether reads the formats your team already uses, runs alongside your incumbent stack during the pilot, and integrates with the data system you already trust. We don't expect anyone to throw away ten years of tooling on day one.
How fast is integration?
Stand-up is typically two weeks once we've agreed scope, data and boundary. Faster if you're already in our supported deployment topologies; slower for sovereign/air-gapped environments where the security review is the long pole.
Bring Aether into your public sector workflow.
Send us the workload that hurts. We'll come back with a scoped pilot — three to eight weeks, win condition defined together.