An Australian sovereign AI company has just released its own high-performance, highly secure answer to the world’s premier AI large language models. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
In the age of AI, when ChatGPT and Claude can draft a report in moments, one question looms large in offices across Australia: where does the data go?
Government agencies, defence contractors, biosecurity authorities and large enterprises are especially wary of services running on overseas servers, which may expose confidential information to foreign jurisdictions with differing privacy standards from Australia’s.
This tension between capability and control has created demand for a home‑grown alternative — and a Canberra-based company has just answered the call.
Agentaus is the latest product from Trellis Data, an Australian sovereign AI company specialising in secure, high-security machine learning solutions for government, defence and law enforcement.
It’s not just another chatbot, according to Trellis Data founder Michael Gately.
“It’s a sovereign AI service built to keep Australian data onshore, while rivalling the performance of the world’s leading models,” he says.
Agentaus operates out of Canberra-based data centres, with expansion pathways across Australia. All facilities meet Defence-grade security standards, ensuring every end-to-end encrypted request and response stays strictly within national borders.
Michael says highly efficient models are used to produce exceptionally good results in terms of environmental impacts.
“We benchmark them against larger models for the purpose of helping businesses and government achieve their own targets for productivity in AI, by using a fraction of the energy used by other counterparts.”
The platform aligns with the Australian Government’s Information Security Manual, the Privacy Act and the Defence Information Security Manual, allowing agencies already navigating complex regulatory landscapes to adopt advanced AI without re‑writing legal frameworks.
Furthermore, it eliminates the question marks around AI hallucinations or accuracy. Instead of relying on the open internet, organisations can feed the Agentaus their own ‘brain’ — everything from internal SOPs to policy manuals. This ensures every answer is grounded in the company’s own sanctioned sources.
But equally important is Trellis Data’s ‘zero‑training policy’. Unlike many commercial large‑language models that continually ingest user interactions to improve future outputs, Agentaus never repurposes customer queries for training.
“We’re entering a world of increasing commercialisation of people’s data in AI, and it’s a big issue,” Michael says.
“It allows businesses to top search ranks, which can build distrust in AI results — and we have no intention of compromising user trust.
“We guarantee we won’t touch people’s data, nor will we commercialise it, and that includes training. Customers can use Agentaus freely, knowing their data won’t be modified or otherwise used.”
Trellis Data founder Michael Gately says Agentaus is the start of an exciting journey, one all Australians can contribute to. Photo: Trellis Data.
Within an organisation, the platform uses granular role‑based access to ensure each user sees only what they are authorised to see.
“AI tends to increasingly ‘bleed’ information across domains and users, and people may end up having access to information they really shouldn’t,” Michael says.
“Anything covered by an HR department, for example — payroll, health, employee performance issues — it’s critical people don’t accidentally pass information on.”
The platform also goes a step further by incorporating other specialised tech from Trellis, such as multilingual translation, style‑compliant writing and content creation, all pre-trained to align with the Australian Government Style Manual.
“These are turnkey, government‑grade tools that fit directly into existing processes,” Michael says.
Trellis now offers on-premises deployment for organisations requiring fully disconnected AI, with optional dedicated hardware maintained in-house and completely air-gapped from the internet.
There’s also an opportunity to dip a toe and test the tech yourself. The free tier removes the “pay-to-play” barrier, ensuring any Aussie can cut their teeth on a platform that adheres to the Australian Government Style Manual and local privacy standards from day one.
“The time is right, and we have the skills in-house to be ‘those guys’ who contribute something Aussie-made, rather than to be consumers of overseas products.
“The free-tier means anyone can sign up and try Aussie-made AI themselves, and for big business and government to scale up.
“We hope everyone tries it and, importantly, provides feedback. We’re just at the start of a very exciting journey, and one way to think of it is, you now have a hotline to a company that’s going to build AI to do things the way you want it to.”
For more information, visit Agentaus.ai.
