The questionnaire landed at 2:40 on a Tuesday in March. Forty-one questions, most of it badge access and backup retention.
Question 26 asked us to list every third-party service, including AI providers, that receives or processes customer technical data.
I typed None. Went to 27.
Four seconds. It had taken about a year to be able to type it.
There’s something about a drawing that people outside this trade don’t see. It’s never only a drawing.
Tolerances. Material callout. Heat treat, finish, the datum scheme, what gets inspected and what doesn’t.
Lay four prints from the same company side by side and someone competent reads their product off them. What it mates to. Where it’s going. What they’ve already learned not to do.
That’s years of somebody’s engineering spend, sitting in a PDF.
The easy path with that PDF takes about a week. Sign up with a commercial provider, get an API key, start sending drawings and part numbers and your own pricing history right next to them.
It works. It costs almost nothing to start. Most shops running AI at all are running it that way, and they aren’t doing anything wrong.
The file goes over a wire into a building nobody in the transaction owns, in a region nobody specified, and neither you nor your supplier could produce a list of who can see it. A print sitting in a data center you can’t point to stops being a file — it’s your engineering department, in a folder, in a country you didn’t pick.
So we did it the other way.
Servers we bought outright, in a room in our building in Stuart, on our network, that I administer. Open-source models running on them. When a drawing gets read, it gets read in there.
No geometry, no part number, no quantity, no price goes to ChatGPT, to Claude, or to any other outside provider. None of it trains anyone’s model, including ours.
Five months, and about what a good used machining center costs.
Here’s the part I’d rather not write.
The frontier models are better than what we run. Not at everything. At enough. Scanned prints with handwritten revisions in the margin gave us months of trouble. There are things I’d like to build that I’m not building, because the only version that works today means sending your geometry somewhere I’ve said it won’t go.
I gave that up on purpose. That’s a trade, and I’d make it again.
I built the whole thing for that questionnaire. A defense program. A buyer who knew exactly what to ask and had the weight behind him to make the answer matter.
In June I pulled the count of what the system had read since it went live. Four hundred and thirty-one quotes.
Then I counted how many of those customers had ever asked me where their technical data goes.
Eleven.
Eleven.
The rest never asked. Not because they didn’t care. Because nobody tells you it’s a question you’re allowed to ask.
One of them is two guys down in Fort Lauderdale building something they haven’t announced yet. Six PDFs and a one-line email on a Thursday afternoon. No security team. No form. Their whole company was in those six files.
They got the same answer the defense program got.
They’ll never know they got it.
The protection can’t depend on being asked for.
For most of the history of this trade, a drawing went from one building to one other building and stopped there. That was the entire security model. It held for a hundred years and nobody ever wrote it down.
It stopped holding about three years ago. Quietly. In whatever week your supplier signed up for an API key.
The question isn’t whether your supplier will answer question 26.
It’s whether the answer would be any different if you’d never sent the form.
