33 frequently asked questions.

What is Promethean?

Promethean is a self-service SaaS that makes 'we have a cryptographic audit log of every decision our AI model made' structurally true for engineering teams shipping LLM-in-the-loop features in regulated products. It binds every LLM call to a closed-enum schema, signs each call's metadata into a hash-chained Ed25519 log (the L12 receipt chain), optionally anchors the chain head to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps, and ships a ~500-line Apache-2.0 verifier regulators run air-gapped against any chain.

What is Promethean NOT?

Promethean is not a compliance attestation (the substrate enumerates evidence; your counsel decides if it satisfies the obligation in your context). Not an AI alignment solution (it makes the model's behaviour auditable; it doesn't make the model behave). Not a certification body (it gives evidence; the auditor certifies). Not a substitute for regulator judgment (the chain proves what happened; whether what happened satisfies the mandate is the regulator's call).

Does PII or PHI ever enter the L12 chain?

No. The substrate's design stores SHA-256 hashes of inputs (inputHash) and outputs (outputCanonicalHash) only — raw PII / PHI never enters the chain. GDPR Art. 5(1)(c) data minimisation, HIPAA min-necessary, COPPA + GDPR Art. 8 child-data protection are all satisfied by construction. Operators retain raw data under their own retention policy.

What is the L12 receipt chain?

A hash-chained, Ed25519-signed log of every LLM-in-the-loop decision a Promethean-built product makes. Each entry carries id, timestamp, productId, specId, specHash, inputHash, outputCanonicalHash, category, modelIdentity, latencyMs, schemaValid, reviewerVerdict, fallbackTriggered, prevHash, and per-entry attestation. Chain heads are optionally anchored to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps.

Glossary entry →

Does Promethean help with EU AI Act compliance?

Yes. The substrate directly addresses Art. 12 (record-keeping is exactly what the L12 chain is), Art. 14 (reviewer-gate evidence), Art. 15 (fallback rate + schema-valid rate as accuracy/robustness proxies). For Art. 9 (risk management), Art. 10 (data governance), and Art. 11 + Annex IV (technical documentation), the substrate provides the per-decision evidence component; the operator's risk-management + data-governance documentation sits on top.

Deep-dive →

How does Promethean help with GDPR Art. 22?

Art. 22 requires meaningful human intervention for solely-automated decisions producing legal effects. After Schufa CJEU C-634/21 (2023), scoring-style processing that materially influences a downstream decision is in scope, and rubber-stamp review doesn't satisfy 'meaningful'. The substrate's reviewer-gate primitive captures per-decision verdict + identifier; the override-rate aggregate is the empirical evidence that human review is meaningful (non-zero override = real intervention).

Deep-dive →

Does Promethean satisfy DORA requirements for financial entities?

Promethean addresses the AI-decisioning slice of DORA. Art. 17 (incident-management process), Art. 18 (incident classification), Art. 19 (24h/72h notification) — when AI misbehaves, the chain provides the precise time window + impact metrics via fallbackTriggered + schemaValid counts. Art. 28 (third-party ICT risk) — if Promethean is your provider, the audit bundle + chain feed your register of information. Promethean is not a DORA-conformity service for the wider ICT estate.

Deep-dive →

Does Promethean satisfy HIPAA §164.312(b) audit controls?

For AI-decisioning events involving ePHI, yes. The L12 chain provides hardware-and-software-enforced recording: the substrate emits per-decision entries; the operator cannot disable emission. Per-entry Ed25519 attestation provides integrity. Your wider SIEM for non-AI ePHI access patterns (database queries, API calls) is operator-side; Promethean is the AI-decisioning slice.

When does PSD3 apply + how does Promethean fit?

PSD3 (COM(2023) 367) is in trilogue. Best-estimate entry into force 2027 with 12-18 month transposition. Art. 87 (fraud-prevention explainability) + Art. 88 (SCA exemption documentation, reproducible per decision) are the two articles most directly addressed. The substrate's spec-hash binding + per-decision rationale field give you the structured evidence both articles demand.

Deep-dive →

What's the MDR Annex VIII rule 11 connection?

Rule 11 classifies software intended to provide information for diagnostic or therapeutic decisions as Class IIa or higher. Class IIa+ medical-device software incorporating AI is high-risk under EU AI Act Art. 6(1) (because MDR is on AI Act Annex I). Promethean is not a CE-marked component itself — it's the per-decision evidence layer alongside your CDS that feeds Art. 83 post-market surveillance + Annex IV technical documentation.

How much does Promethean cost?

Five tiers. Dev (€0) for evaluation: 1 spec, 10k entries/month, daily OTS anchoring. Team (€79/spec/month, unlimited specs): 100k entries/spec, single-tenant. Production (€499/month flat): 25 specs, 1M entries/month allowance, hourly OTS, multi-tenant. Scale (€1,199/mo): 50 specs, 5M entries/month allowance, 30-min OTS (roadmap: federation full, HSM hooks). Enterprise (€2,499/mo): 10M entries/month fair-use, 15-min Bitcoin-anchored OTS, framework templates (all 7), with HSM custody + on-prem deployment on the roadmap.

Full pricing →

How is billing handled? Can we cancel anytime?

Stripe checkout, monthly billing, cancel anytime. No annual lock-in. Procurement-friendly at Enterprise tier (~€30k/year) — below most single-PO thresholds for IT services.

How do I know which tier I need?

Run the tier picker on the industries hub — 4-question quiz mapping sector + volume + multi-tenant model + framework-template need to a recommended tier. Most SMBs land on Team (low-volume, few specs) or Production (mid-volume, 25+ specs, multi-tenant). Healthtech + Govtech with framework-template needs typically Enterprise.

Tier picker →

What's the ROI vs status quo?

Conservative back-of-envelope: status-quo audit-evidence reconstruction (hours × inquiries × engineering rate) vs subscription + ~20% of reconstruction time. The /industries hub has an interactive ROI calculator. Engineering time aside, the bigger upside is unquantified: procurement velocity at enterprise customers + legal posture during regulator inquiries.

ROI calculator →

Does Promethean replace our LLM vendor (Anthropic / OpenAI / Azure)?

No. Promethean does not proxy LLM calls. Your service still calls your LLM vendor directly. Promethean records the decision metadata (spec hash, model identity, input hash, output canonical hash, schema-valid flag, reviewer verdict, fallback flag) into the L12 chain as a side effect of the call. Your LLM-vendor relationship is unchanged.

Does Promethean replace Datadog / Splunk / Sentry?

No. Datadog / Splunk / Sentry are observability tools — they tell you what your application is doing. Promethean is an audit-trail tool — it produces tamper-evident evidence of AI decisions. The L12 chain is hash-chained + Ed25519-signed + OTS-anchored; observability logs are operator-editable. Most operators run both.

Can Promethean run on-premise / self-hosted?

Enterprise tier targets on-prem deployment on the roadmap; today Enterprise runs hosted on Promethean infrastructure (Vercel EU Frankfurt + Upstash EU). The SDK always runs in your operator infrastructure regardless of tier. The verifier (verify.mjs) is always operator-side or auditor-side. Common in healthtech / govtech / large-carrier insurance procurement.

What does the verifier require to run?

Node 18+ stdlib only. ~500 lines of plain JavaScript. No Promethean infrastructure at verification time. Apache-2.0 unconditionally. Regulators run it air-gapped against any chain that a Promethean-built product produced.

Verifier walkthrough →

Is the SDK only TypeScript / Node?

The reference SDK is TypeScript (BSL-1.1). The canonical form is language-agnostic — Python / Go / Rust emitters can produce hash-identical entries by following the documented canonical-form rules. Re-implementations are encouraged on the SDK side; the verifier is the only authoritative reader and works on any compliant emitter's output.

How does multi-tenant work?

R4 multi-tenancy: each L12 entry can carry an optional tenantId. The verifier supports scoping verification to a specific tenant. Available on Production tier and above. You ship each customer a per-tenant audit bundle filtered to their tenantId; they verify with verify.mjs without seeing other tenants' data.

Glossary →

What is federation (R5)?

Federation lets two or more operators commit decisions to a shared L12 chain without trusting Promethean as referee. Federation read primitives are validated; cross-workspace commit ships on Scale + Enterprise per the roadmap. Use cases: consortium fraud detection across banks, multi-hospital clinical decision support, cross-government identity verification chains.

Can our enterprise customer hold their own signing keys?

HSM key custody is on the roadmap for Scale + Enterprise; today, operator-managed env-var key custody is documented. Once shipped, operator-controlled keys will integrate with AWS CloudHSM, Azure Key Vault HSM, GCP Cloud HSM. The substrate will use the HSM-resident private key for signing; the public key is already published in the audit bundle.

What license is the verifier under?

Apache-2.0 unconditionally. Regulators can read, fork, audit, re-implement, and run verify.mjs without restriction. The Apache-2.0 carve-out is structural — it cannot be revoked by Promethean later.

Licensing details →

What license is the SDK under?

Business Source License 1.1. Operators may use the SDK freely inside their own product. Offering it as a competing hosted service is prohibited until the Change Date (2030-05-15), when it auto-converts to Apache-2.0. Same model as HashiCorp, Sentry, MongoDB, CockroachDB.

Licensing details →

Is there free / discounted access for humanitarian use?

Yes. The 'For Good' tier is structurally free for verified non-profit deployments — UN agencies, humanitarian NGOs, public-good research. The substrate's design constraints are the same; the commercial terms aren't.

For Good tier →

Fintech / payments — how does Promethean fit?

Fintech-AI uses (fraud classification, SCA exemption, KYC extraction, AML narrative) are covered. PSD2 Art. 95 + DORA Art. 17/18 + AI Act §5(b) for credit-scoring AI all map to substrate primitives. Recommended tier: Production (€499/mo).

Fintech sector page →

Healthtech / medical devices — how does Promethean fit?

Clinical decision support (Class IIa+ under MDR Annex VIII rule 11 + AI Act Art. 6(1)), prior-auth AI, clinical-note structuring, mental-health risk screening. PHI never enters the chain. Recommended tier: Enterprise.

Healthtech sector page →

HR Tech / recruiting — how does Promethean fit?

Resume screening, interview scoring (text-only — emotion-recognition prohibited from 2 Feb 2025 under AI Act Art. 5(1)(f)), performance review summarisation. AI Act §4 + GDPR Art. 22 + NYC AEDT + EEOC. Recommended tier: Production.

HR Tech sector page →

Where do I find my sector?

12 sectors live at /industries: fintech, healthtech, hr-tech, insurtech, edtech, legaltech, govtech, proptech, adtech, customer-support, cybersecurity, energy. Each has its own regulatory mapping, LLM-feature catalogue, evidence mapping, tier recommendation, hypothetical example, and 5 sector-specific FAQ entries.

Industries hub →

How long from sign-up to first L12 entry in production?

Median ~1 day for a single-spec deployment. Sign up (30 seconds), install SDK (npm install one URL), author your first spec (~2 hours), wire runConstrainedAI into your existing service code (~1 hour), test against the Dev tier, promote to Team / Production. Most fintech / healthtech SMBs go live within a week.

Quickstart →

Are there spec templates to copy?

Yes — 12+ copy-pasteable RuntimeAISpec TypeScript snippets covering the typical LLM-in-the-loop features across 9 sectors. Each template includes the closed-enum schema, prompt template, reviewer gate, fallback behaviour, and the regulations it addresses.

Spec templates gallery →

What does the regulator handoff look like?

Audit bundle: zip download containing the verifier (verify.mjs, Apache-2.0), workspace identity (workspace.json with signing public key + chain heads + tier), recent-receipts.jsonl + .csv, anchor-history.jsonl, README.md. The bundle equips a regulator to verify a chain air-gapped; the chain itself comes from the operator's separate export.

For regulators →

Does Promethean have SOC 2 / ISO 27001?

SOC 2 Type II is on the roadmap; ISO 27001 + EU CSA Cybersecurity Certification Scheme planned post-revenue-validation. The substrate's cryptographic primitives (Ed25519 + SHA-256 + hash chain + OpenTimestamps anchoring) provide stronger evidence than most certifications by themselves, but procurement still wants the formal cert.