One seat. Both disciplines. Inside the boundary.
A Cleared FDE™ is a cleared engineer who is an expert in security and AI at the same time, the person who selects the model also writes the control boundary, and the person who connects the data sits in the authorization meeting. It is the service behind every Federal AI product, and the reason our deployments survive contact with the mission.
Cleared FDE™ is a trademark of Federal AI · U.S. trademark application pending (USPTO)
The translation layer is where programs die.
The standard model splits AI delivery between an AI team that has never met an ISSO and a security team that reviews what it didn't build. Every requirement crosses a handoff, and the handoff is where quarters disappear. The Cleared FDE model deletes the layer: one engineer holds both halves of the problem, so decisions that took a memo cycle happen in a working session.
The governance half of the discipline is public engineering, not marketing: read The Evidence Ledger, the record structure behind every governed workflow, and the Air-Gap Delivery Checklist (PDF).
Able to work in customer-approved secure environments, including disconnected and air-gapped networks most vendors never see. We say "cleared" and no more; specifics belong in an appropriate setting, not on a website.
Platform hardening, identity, policy, and evidence, and model integration, evaluations, and mission workflows, from the same person, held to the same standard.
Beside the operators who own the workflow, from day one. The acceptance test is written with the end user, and the weekly working session replaces the requirements document.
Enter through one bounded workflow, stay through acceptance, leave working capability and trained operators behind, never a slide deck.
Three roles, one team, your mission.
Every engagement fields the same three-role structure, scaled to the workflow. Names and backgrounds are shared under NDA in an appropriate setting, a discipline we apply to our own people for the same reason we apply it to your mission.
Owns the recurring decision, the mission owner relationship, the value baseline, the authority model, and the acceptance test. The person accountable for "did this actually work."
Builds the connectors, model routing, evaluation cases, and the operator experience. Fluent in the approved-model landscape and in the systems your facts live in.
Owns identity, deployment profile, evidence, offline packaging, hardening, and rollback. The reason the authorization conversation starts on day one instead of month six.
Founded by an engineer, run by engineers
Federal AI was founded and is led by Lloyd Clark, Ph.D. based in the National Capital Region. The company exists because the founder kept watching capable AI die at the boundary between the lab and the mission, and decided the fix was a person who belongs on both sides. HUBZone small business · CAGE 7UCA4 · UEI MV3AMKSSPZR1.
We hire cleared engineers. Selectively.
If you hold a clearance, have shipped real software in a regulated or disconnected environment, and can hold your own in both a security review and a model-evaluation discussion, we should talk. Every Cleared FDE is measured against the published Standard, read it first, then write us with what you've built.
Bring the workflow that hurts.
Thirty minutes with a technical lead. You leave with a candidate architecture, what a 90-day proof would deliver, and a clear go/no-go, not a capabilities pitch.