Ask an AI a confidential question. In a closed machine.

TAIA Confidential Ask: addendum to the terms of use. Version 1.0, 2 November 2026. TAIA GmbH, Seestrasse 353, 8038 Zürich, UID CHE-189.956.337 ("TAIA"), info@taia.ch. By asking a question you accept the TAIA Confidential Screening terms of use and this addendum; where this addendum says something different, it prevails for TAIA Confidential Ask. For a paid plan, you accept them by ticking the box at checkout before you pay. Paid plans are for business use only (Screening terms, section 2).

A1. What it is. TAIA Confidential Ask answers a question you type with a text generated by an open-weight language model (Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct (Microsoft), 4-bit quantised (Q4_K_M), MIT licence, run by TAIA). The answer is built only from passages of the public regulatory documents TAIA has loaded (the "Sources"): Swiss federal acts and ordinances published on Fedlex (English translations where they exist, otherwise German); circulars and guidance of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA (English and German); the General Data Protection Regulation and the Artificial Intelligence Act of the European Union, consolidated texts from the Publications Office of the European Union (English); and guidelines of the European Data Protection Board and its predecessor, the Article 29 Working Party (English). The full list of loaded documents, with each document's version, is the manifest TAIA keeps for each snapshot; TAIA sends it on request (info@taia.ch). No text is included whose publisher has not given a reuse basis recorded in that manifest. The page lists the Sources used for each answer, with publisher and link. The answer is general information generated by software. It is not legal, tax or compliance advice, not a statement of TAIA and not a decision. It can be incomplete or wrong even when it cites a Source. Read the Source before you rely on anything.

A2. The Sources. The Sources are a snapshot of public documents (laws, circulars, publishers' guidance) that TAIA loaded when it built the current version of the service. They are not updated continuously; a document can have changed since. The page names the publisher of each Source shown under an answer (title, publisher and link; the Sources carry no individual date) and the date of the snapshot (the service reports it with every answer and on the page; a fingerprint of the snapshot is reported with it). If no Source passage matches your question, the service does not call the model and answers "I cannot answer this from the available sources."

A3. What "confidential" means here, and what it does not. Your question is sent over an encrypted connection that ends inside the service's own process, which runs on a Google Cloud confidential computing node with AMD SEV memory encryption in Zürich (Google Cloud europe-west6). The page states this "per GKE's node label, checked HH:MM UTC": TAIA reads the node type from Google's node label and shows when it last checked; it has no independent proof of the hardware state and makes no attestation claim. SEV encrypts the node's memory against the host; it does not hide the question from TAIA's own service, which must read your question in plain text inside that process to answer it. Google's platform and control plane are trusted parts of this set-up. Unlike TAIA Confidential Screening, TAIA Confidential Ask does not use homomorphic encryption: the protection is where the processing happens and that TAIA keeps nothing, not that TAIA cannot read. Inside an answer the model may call itself "TAIA Ask"; that is the short name of this service, TAIA Confidential Ask, and not a different service.

A4. What TAIA keeps. TAIA does not store your questions or the answers. The service processes your question and the answer in memory for the time of the request. For each question the service writes one log line with the route, the result status, whether the question was free or asked with a key (and, for a key, TAIA's identifier for it), and how long it took; it contains no question text, no answer text and no network address, and TAIA keeps it for up to 30 days in Switzerland (Google Cloud europe-west6). TAIA's web entry point passes your encrypted connection on without opening it; for this service it keeps no record of the connection and TAIA keeps no record of your network address; the Ask service itself does not see the address. (The 30-day address log described in the Confidential Screening terms, section 8, applies to TAIA's web pages, not to this service.) For a paid plan, TAIA keeps what section 7.7 and section 8 of the Screening terms describe: a hash of your access key, the count of questions per key and day, and the purchase record held by Stripe (privacy note, section 6b); an Ask key is separate from a Screening key: the two services keep separate key lists and separate counters, and a key for one does not work for the other. TAIA does not use your questions to train or tune any model.

A5. Your use. Do not put personal data, client data or confidential information of others into a question; the service needs none of it to answer. Do not use the service to obtain advice for a specific case, to automate decisions about people, or to probe or overload it. The Confidential Screening terms, section 6, apply.

A6. Limits and liability. The model can produce wrong, outdated or misleading text and can misread a Source. TAIA does not warrant the correctness, completeness or fitness of any answer, nor the availability of the service. Section 9 of the Confidential Screening terms (liability) applies: for a paid plan, TAIA's liability for slight negligence is limited to the fees you paid to TAIA in the 12 months before the event; for the free use, TAIA is liable only for intent and gross negligence. An answer is not advice and creates no duty of care toward a specific case; decisions you take on an answer are yours.

A7. Plans, prices and access keys.

1. Free: the service answers one question at a time; other questions wait in a queue, and questions asked with a paid access key are answered before free questions. At most one free question can wait at a time; if the place is taken, the page says the service is busy and asks you to try again shortly. The service accepts at most 20 free questions a minute in total for all visitors, and at most 100 free questions a day in total for all visitors (the day ends at 00:00 UTC, which is 01:00 Zürich time in winter and 02:00 in summer); when the daily total is used up, the page says so and paid keys still work. The daily count is kept in the service's memory; if the service restarts during the day, the count starts again, so more than 100 free questions may be answered on that day. Because the connection ends inside the service's own process, the service does not see your network address and does not count free questions per address. The free questions may be paused or ended at any time.
2. Paid plans: two plans, each for one named user per access key, paid in advance through Stripe. Monthly plan, CHF 99 a month: includes 500 questions in each paid month; a paid month runs from the day of payment to the same day of the next month (not the calendar month); renews every month until you cancel; you can cancel at any time to the end of the paid month, in the Stripe customer portal or by e-mail to info@taia.ch; questions not used in a paid month do not carry over. 12-month package, CHF 490 once: includes 2,000 questions to use within 12 months from the day the key is delivered; no automatic renewal; the package ends when the 2,000 questions are used or the 12 months are over, whichever comes first; questions not used by then lapse. How the included questions are counted: the service does not stop a key by itself when the questions included in a plan are used up; TAIA counts each key's usage from the usage log at least once a week and may switch off a key that has used its included questions (monthly plan: for the rest of that paid month; package: for good) and tells you by e-mail; questions answered beyond the included number before TAIA switches the key off are not charged. Prices are shown on the Ask page before checkout.
3. Daily limit and the queue: each access key also has a daily limit of 30 questions (both plans), and the page shows how many questions your key has left today; the day ends at 00:00 UTC (01:00 Zürich time in winter, 02:00 in summer). The day's count is kept in the service's memory; if the service restarts during the day, the count starts again, in your favour. The daily limit is applied by the service at once; the questions included in a plan are counted as section A7.2 says. A question counts when the service accepts it, including answers of the form "I cannot answer this from the available sources". Questions asked with a key are not subject to the per-minute limit for free questions, but they wait in the same queue, ahead of free questions: at most four questions with a key can wait at a time; past that, the page says the service is busy and asks you to try again shortly. A question with a key that has waited 90 seconds without being started is returned as busy as well. A question that is not started, because the service is busy, the 90 seconds have passed, you left the page before its turn, or the service hours ended, is not answered and does not count against the daily limit or the daily free total; a question counts once the service has started answering it. It does not count if the service itself fails to finish the answer (an error or a timeout on TAIA's side); it does count if you leave before the answer is finished. A key the service does not recognise is refused; the question is not answered as a free question.
4. Key delivery: TAIA sends your access key by e-mail to the address given at checkout within two business days; it is for one named user (the buyer, unless you name a different user when the key is delivered). Screening terms section 7.7 applies (keep it secret; TAIA stores only a hash; lost keys).
5. Refunds: a key gives access at once, so payments are not refunded once the key has been used for a first question (monthly plan: for the month already paid; 12-month package: for the package). A key not used for any question is refunded in full if you ask within 14 days of purchase. If TAIA ends TAIA Confidential Ask, or ends or blocks your plan for a reason other than Screening terms section 6, before the end of the paid period, TAIA refunds the unused part: for the monthly plan in proportion to the days left in the paid month, for the 12-month package in proportion to the questions left.
6. Prices and receipts: Prices are in CHF. No VAT is charged: TAIA GmbH is not registered for Swiss VAT; if TAIA becomes liable for Swiss VAT, prices for purchases made from that date include it. Stripe sends the payment receipt. Stripe's processing of your checkout data is described in the privacy note, section 6b.

A7a. Service hours. The service is available Monday to Friday from 07:00 to 20:00 Zürich time (CET/CEST), on public holidays as on other weekdays. Outside these hours the page says so and no question is accepted. The hours are part of the plan you buy: they are shown before checkout, and paid periods are not extended for the hours outside the window. TAIA may extend the hours at any time and may change them for future purchases with the notice in section A9; for a plan already paid, the hours shown at purchase apply until the end of the paid period, unless TAIA extends them. TAIA may suspend the service for maintenance (announced on the page) or for urgent technical or legal reasons (Screening terms section 10).

A8. Model licences and attribution. The model and the serving software are open-source components under their own licences, named on the page: the model is Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct (© Microsoft Corporation, MIT License, 4-bit GGUF file from Microsoft's repository); the serving software is llama.cpp (MIT License). Their copyright and permission notices, and the publishers' notices named below, are reproduced on the licences page (taia.ch/licences/). The Sources remain their publishers' texts and are reused with attribution; only the publishers' texts are authoritative. Swiss federal acts and ordinances and FINMA circulars and guidance are official texts and official collections (Art. 5 para. 1 lit. a and c and para. 2 of the Swiss Copyright Act). The English texts of Swiss acts are the Confederation's translations; each carries Fedlex's own notice, in one of two wordings ("English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation. This translation is provided for information purposes only and has no legal force." or "English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation. This translation is provided for information purposes only, has no legal force and may not be relied on in legal proceedings."), both reproduced on the licences page; TAIA adds: the German, French and Italian texts published in the Official Compilation are the authentic versions. EU regulations are consolidated texts from the Publications Office of the European Union (© European Union), reused with the source acknowledged; TAIA shows the text article by article and has removed the editorial consolidation markers, the footnotes and the headings between articles; the wording of each article is unchanged; consolidated texts are a documentation tool, the Official Journal of the European Union is authentic. The guidelines of the European Data Protection Board and the Article 29 Working Party are reused under the EDPB's copyright notice, with the source acknowledged and the meaning not distorted. None of these publishers is connected with this service or endorses it. Where a passage is shown, the page names the publisher, the document and the link.

A9. Changes. TAIA may change the model, the Sources, the snapshot date and the plans, and will show the current ones on the page. Section 11 of the Confidential Screening terms applies.

A10. Firm pilots. A pilot on a firm's own documents, in a processing environment set up for that firm, is not covered by these terms; it runs under a separate written pilot agreement.