Digital Digest: The Latest Tech News – Custodia, Sentinel

Editorial Staff

8 June 2026

Custodia, Sentinel
, a Swiss privacy-first AI startup, has announced its launch of Sentinel, a physical AI thinking appliance for executives, family offices, scientific researchers, and any professional whose intellectual property is too valuable and too sensitive to be trusted to the cloud.

Sentinel is a standalone hardware appliance that runs its AI model locally, stores users’ documents privately, and has no connection to external servers, cloud infrastructure, or third-party networks.

Custodia, headquartered in Lugano, said in a statement last week that it already has working units in the hands of researchers, advisors, and executives who have been testing it.

Explaining its business case, Custodia said that every major AI platform – ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and their peers – operates on the same underlying architecture: a user’s queries, your documents, and thinking travel to remote servers controlled by technology companies based overwhelmingly in the US. These companies operate under US federal legal frameworks that can compel disclosure of private IP and personal information, and they are built on business models that have historically depended on knowing as much about their users as possible.

“Every major platform that said it would not use your data, sell your data, or allow your data to be accessed has, at some point, been found to have done exactly that. Class action suits against AI data practices are multiplying,” the firm said.

The firm added that Sentinel is available now for select early adopters via a “curated waiting list.”