{
  "key": "aurelian-committed-capacity",
  "dealName": "DEMO — Multi-year committed capacity",
  "accountName": "DEMO — Aurelian Systems",
  "stage": "legal",
  "status": "open",
  "summary": "DEMO — Three-year reservation of 128 H200s in Frankfurt for Aurelian's Zurich research lab, technically well qualified and stuck in paper for sixteen weeks. Four blocking items remain (the DPO determination on the claims corpus, the base licence redistribution question — the half of weights ownership that is not answered — retention against checkpoint lineage, and Krall's on-site audit demand), the 14 July Group Investment Committee window was missed, and the regulatory deadline that gave the deal its urgency has moved to Q4 2027.",
  "openedDaysAgo": 132,
  "artefacts": [
    {
      "templateSlug": "technical-discovery",
      "stage": "qualification",
      "title": "DEMO — First Technical Discovery: Aurelian Risk Intelligence Lab",
      "status": "final",
      "authoredDaysAgo": 124,
      "body": "*Filled in from the call on the 124-day mark, Zurich, 95 minutes. Present: Dr Ines Marchetti (Head of the Aurelian Risk Intelligence Lab), Konrad Brenner (Head of Research Infrastructure), Léa Bonnard (senior research engineer, runs the training stack day to day). Anders Lovgren, Group CTO, joined for the last fifteen minutes.*\n\n## The company and the constraint\n\nAurelian Systems AG is a Zurich-headquartered specialty reinsurer and catastrophe risk analytics group, roughly 4,100 staff, with a 40-person internal lab split between Zurich and Edinburgh. They are not buying a workflow outcome. They are buying capacity, and the question this call had to answer is whether the workloads they intend to put on it are real and sized, or aspirational.\n\nThey are compute-bound today and can prove it. 64 A100s in a colocation cage in Zurich-West, median utilisation 91% over the trailing 90 days, p50 queue wait 6.4 hours and p95 at 41 hours. Bonnard showed the Slurm accounting export rather than a slide, which is the reason this section has numbers in it.\n\n## The three workloads\n\n1. **Domain adaptation of a 27B open-weight base** on 1.9M claims narratives and 240k engineering survey reports. Continued pre-training, then instruction tuning. This is the bulk of the reservation and the reason the ask is H200s rather than more A100s: Bonnard's own measurement on a borrowed node puts the 27B continued-pretraining step at 3.1x an A100 at the same batch, so 128 H200s clears Brenner's 2.4x target with margin for the other two workloads.\n2. **RL post-training of the Exposure Note agent**, which drafts facultative reinsurance submissions from a broker packet. Human turnaround today is 3.2 days median per submission. A prompted frontier baseline reaches 61% field-complete against the 14 mandatory fields; the internal acceptance bar is 94%.\n3. **Ensemble catastrophe model calibration**, non-LLM, bursty, currently the thing that starves workloads 1 and 2 every quarter-end.\n\n## Traces, verification, baseline\n\nTraces exist and are unusually good: 11,400 facultative submissions with the adjudicated label attached, because the underwriting committee already records a structured decision. That is the seed of a verifier — 14 mandatory fields are rules-checkable, and narrative adequacy would need a judge calibrated against committee sign-off. Nobody has built either yet. Marchetti agreed to have Bonnard prototype the field checker.\n\nRights to use the narratives are the open question and were the last thing raised. The claims corpus contains bodily-injury records, which means special-category health data under the Swiss FADP and the GDPR. Brenner's honest answer: \"nobody has ever asked to move it, so nobody has ever refused.\"\n\n## The number and who says it\n\nBrenner owns the utilisation number and says it without hedging: research infrastructure must reach 2.4x current training throughput to clear the model recalibration programme's backlog. He also said, unprompted, that 128 reserved GPUs at a fixed monthly cost is easier for him to defend internally than a variable hyperscaler bill, because his budget line is annual and flat.\n\n## What is missing\n\nNo named budget line yet beyond \"the modernisation programme\". No security contact in the room. No environment work of any kind has been attempted — nobody has yet described how the training data would physically reach a Prime Intellect region, and I did not push it in this call. Lovgren was clear that a multi-year commitment goes to the Group Investment Committee, which he chairs, and that he will not take it there until legal have cleared the data question.",
      "kind": "discovery"
    },
    {
      "templateSlug": "trainability-qualification",
      "stage": "qualification",
      "title": "DEMO — Trainability and Deal Qualification: Aurelian Systems",
      "status": "final",
      "authoredDaysAgo": 116,
      "body": "*Scored from the notes of the discovery call. Technical subtotal 33 of 57, commercial 30.25 of 43, weighted result 63.25 — Qualified, conditional.*\n\n## Why this is scored at all for a capacity deal\n\nAurelian are buying reserved compute, not a post-training outcome, so half of this scorecard is arguably out of scope. It is scored anyway, because a three-year commitment is only defensible if the workloads that justify it can actually be built. If the Exposure Note agent turns out to be untrainable, the reservation is oversized by roughly a third within eighteen months and the renewal is lost before it starts.\n\n## Disqualifiers\n\nTwo of the four hard overrides are in play and neither is triggered yet.\n\n**No rights to train on the data.** Not triggered, because nothing has been refused — but nothing has been granted either. Stefan Reuss, Group DPO, has issued no written determination that the claims corpus may be used to train a model. What turns this live is a determination that the bodily-injury subset may be processed but not used for training. If that lands, workload 1 disappears and this record goes to Decline regardless of the arithmetic above.\n\n**Incompatible weights-ownership or deployment expectation.** Not triggered. Aurelian own the checkpoint, the adapters and the merged weights, and we have said so in writing. What turns this live is the cedant portal: Aurelian intend to expose the adapted model to their cedants, which may be redistribution under the 27B base licence. If Hertzfeld and Bau read it that way and the base provider will not licence around it, the deployment expectation and the base are incompatible and this becomes a re-scope onto a different base.\n\n## Where the points are lost\n\n**Verifier availability and quality (2, losing 26 weighted points).** The largest single loss and the one to fix first. The raw material is there — 11,400 adjudicated facultative submissions, committee decisions already structured — but neither the rules-based field checker nor the narrative judge exists. Until Bonnard's prototype runs against a held-out set this is a plan, not an instrument, and the anchors are explicit that \"they said they have it\" scores a 1.\n\n**Traces, rights, and volume (2).** Volume is not the problem; 1.9M claims narratives is more than the domain adaptation needs. Rights are. Bodily-injury records make this special-category data, the corpus has never left the Zurich estate, and there is no written internal determination that it may.\n\n**Environment constructibility (2).** Scored down from my first instinct. Nothing has been built and nothing has been designed: no data path out of the Zurich cage has been described, the sandbox dependencies of the Exposure Note agent are unenumerated, and Applied Research have not been engaged. The workloads are conventional and that is the only reason this is not a 1.\n\n**Headroom (2).** Domain adaptation of a 27B base on 1.9M in-domain narratives has obvious headroom over prompting. The Exposure Note agent is less clear: 61% to 94% field completeness may be reachable with a better packet parser and retrieval rather than RL, and nobody has run that experiment.\n\n**Security and legal path (1).** No DPA, no MSA, no security contact named, and the data in question is the sensitive kind. This is the gating dimension and it is why the deal goes to legal next rather than to scoping.\n\n## Where the deal is strong\n\n**Named metric owner (4).** Brenner owns training throughput, states the target as 2.4x, and produced the Slurm accounting to support it.\n\n**Executive sponsor (4).** Lovgren is Group CTO, chairs the Investment Committee that must approve the term, and volunteered the approval path without being asked.\n\n**Measured baseline (3).** Utilisation, queue waits, human turnaround and the prompted baseline are all measured. The gap to a 4 is that the 91% figure includes the catastrophe calibration bursts, which are not the workload the reservation is being sized for.\n\n## Verdict\n\nQualified, conditional, at 63.25. The condition is legal and it is not a formality.",
      "kind": "qualification"
    },
    {
      "templateSlug": "strategic-deployment-playbook",
      "stage": "legal",
      "title": "DEMO — Engagement spine: Aurelian committed capacity",
      "status": "final",
      "authoredDaysAgo": 15,
      "body": "*Instantiated for Aurelian Systems and rewritten this week, sixteen weeks into legal, because the version written at qualification no longer described the engagement. Maintained by the forward deployed lead.*\n\n## Shape of this deal\n\nThree-year committed capacity: 128 H200s reserved in Frankfurt at $211,046.33 per month, annualised $2,532,556, which works out at roughly $2.26 per GPU-hour if the reservation is fully used. It is the largest commitment in the book and the one with the least room for a graceful exit, which changes how the stages are run. On a POC-shaped deal you can discover a legal problem at scoping and re-scope. Here the paper is the deal: if trace egress lands badly, the customer is left with reserved capacity they cannot legally feed.\n\n## Qualification — closed, day 116\n\nExit met. Discovery produced measured utilisation, three named workloads and a metric owner who states a number. Scorecard 63.25, Qualified conditional. The condition is recorded against legal, not carried as a general worry.\n\n## Legal — open, current stage, sixteen weeks\n\nThe Data and Security Brief is the artefact carrying this stage and the open-items list is what it has become. Exit criteria, written so someone outside the room could judge them:\n\n1. Executed MSA and DPA, or a signed position paper on the four blocking items with a dated path to signature.\n2. A named transfer instrument for every flow that crosses the Swiss or EEA boundary, including Prime Intellect support access.\n3. A written determination from Aurelian's Group Data Protection Officer that the claims corpus may be used to train a model Aurelian owns.\n\nItem 3 decides whether workload 1 exists. Nothing else in this engagement matters more.\n\n## My own worst mistake on this engagement\n\nI quoted Frankfurt as the region in the first commercial conversation without checking whether the Zurich-to-Frankfurt crossing needed a transfer instrument of its own. It does — Switzerland is a third country for GDPR purposes in one direction and an adequacy case in the other, and Fontaine's team spent three weeks unpicking a position I had presented as settled. That is three of the sixteen weeks this stage has cost, and it is why Reuss now reads everything I send twice. It also means the region is harder to change than it should be, because reopening it reopens that argument.\n\n## Scoping — not started\n\nApplied Research have not been engaged and will not be until the DPA position is known. Marchetti has asked twice for an environment design session and I have said no twice. I am less sure of that than I was: a narrow session on the data path alone would have surfaced the crossing problem above months earlier.\n\n## Procurement — pre-worked, out of sequence\n\nYannick Depré (Category Manager, Indirect Technology) confirmed on day 61 that the spend sits under the Group Technology Modernisation programme, line TM-2027-014, owned by the CFO's office. Commitments beyond twelve months require Group Investment Committee approval. The Committee meets quarterly and Lovgren chairs it. The 14 July 2026 meeting was the target and was missed. The next window is 13 October 2026 and it is not safe either: the paper cannot be drafted without items 1 and 2.\n\n## The honest risk\n\nThe forcing function has gone. The reason a three-year commitment was going to be signed this quarter is that the internal model recalibration had a board-committed submission date of 30 April 2027. Brenner mentioned in passing around day 70 that the Claims Data Fabric migration was slipping and the date might move; it was rumour then and I recorded it as rumour. Lovgren confirmed it on the day-19 call: the submission date is Q4 2027. Nobody at Aurelian has said the deal is less urgent. Everybody's behaviour says it. The counter-move is to stop selling the recalibration timeline and start selling the queue: Brenner's p95 wait of 41 hours is a problem that exists this week regardless of what the regulator's calendar does.",
      "kind": "playbook"
    },
    {
      "templateSlug": "data-and-security-brief",
      "stage": "legal",
      "title": "DEMO — Data and Security Brief: Aurelian Systems",
      "status": "draft",
      "authoredDaysAgo": 18,
      "body": "*Opened with Marchetti and Brenner over three sessions from day 96, then rewritten after the first joint call with their outside counsel on day 19 and written up the following day. Status: draft — six of the fourteen decisions are unanswered and four of those block. Their counsel is Marguerite Fontaine, Deputy General Counsel, supported by Hertzfeld and Bau in Zurich; Group DPO is Stefan Reuss.*\n\n## Legal basis and roles\n\nPrime Intellect paper starts; Fontaine accepted this without argument. Aurelian is controller and Prime Intellect processor, for the reserved capacity and for the domain adaptation runs alike — the model is trained for Aurelian, on Aurelian's instruction. Recorded because Reuss's first written question assumed otherwise.\n\n## Permitted use — answered, not blocking\n\nAurelian data trains Aurelian models and nothing else: no cross-customer training, no shared base, no de-identified service-improvement carve-out. Fontaine's note back said this removed \"the objection we were preparing to lead with\".\n\n## Weights ownership on a derived model — half answered, half blocking\n\nAurelian own the continued-pretrained checkpoint, the adapters and the merged weights outright; that half is answered in writing and Fontaine has accepted it. Two parts need counsel:\n\n- The base is a 27B open-weight model whose licence carries a commercial-use threshold and a downstream redistribution condition. Aurelian intend to expose the adapted model to their cedants through a portal, which is arguably redistribution. That is a question for Hertzfeld and Bau against the base licence, not a question for us, and I have said so in writing to avoid giving advice we are not able to give. **This is the blocking half.**\n- Which party contracts with the base provider. Aurelian would prefer we do. That moves the licence risk above onto us and is a leadership decision, not a lead's.\n\n## Trace egress — blocking\n\nThe claims corpus contains bodily-injury records: special-category health data under both the FADP and the GDPR. Aurelian policy reads \"EEA or Switzerland only\". Frankfurt satisfies that, after three weeks of argument I caused by quoting the region before checking whether the Zurich-to-Frankfurt crossing carried its own instrument. Two gaps remain.\n\nFirst, Reuss has not issued a written determination that the corpus may be used for model training at all, as distinct from being processed. Everything in workload 1 depends on this one memo. It has been \"with the DPO\" for six weeks.\n\nSecond, support access. Our on-call rotation includes engineers outside the EEA, and they are ours, not Aurelian's — an onward transfer processor to processor, so the instrument is EU standard contractual clauses Module 3 with the Swiss addendum plus a supplementary measures note. Fontaine considers this workable; Reuss has not seen it yet.\n\n## Output retention and checkpoint lineage — blocking\n\nRollouts from the Exposure Note agent reproduce claim narrative text verbatim, so they inherit the sensitivity of the source. Aurelian's retention schedule says 90 days for derived artefacts, and that collides with checkpoint lineage: deleting an artefact does not remove its influence from the weights, and removing influence means retraining from a checkpoint predating the ingest. Retaining those pre-ingest checkpoints for the life of the model contradicts the 90-day schedule on its face.\n\nProposed and not yet accepted: artefact deletion and suspension of the affected checkpoint from serving inside Aurelian's own 30-day erasure SLA, with retraining on a separate, priced schedule. A lineage record from artefact to run to checkpoint is a build commitment on our side, and I wrote it into this brief before asking engineering. That was a mistake and it is still live.\n\n## Sandbox egress — answered\n\nThe agent sandbox needs one internal pricing service and nothing else: single-host allowlist, no general egress, sandbox and logs destroyed at 30 days. Bonnard confirmed no second dependency.\n\n## Audit — blocking, stalled on a person\n\nBettina Krall, Group Head of Information Security, asked for on-site inspection of the Frankfurt facility. The right answer is the rung below: a named third-party auditor's review under NDA, plus our published report and 30 days notice of subprocessor change. She has been out since day 40 and her interim, Rui Peixoto, will not overrule her. Her sign-off is a condition precedent on the MSA security schedule, so this blocks signature.",
      "kind": "discovery"
    },
    {
      "templateSlug": null,
      "stage": "legal",
      "title": "DEMO — Legal open items and counsel routing",
      "status": "review",
      "authoredDaysAgo": 12,
      "body": "*A running list, maintained by the forward deployed lead, of what stands between this engagement and a signature. Reviewed with Marchetti every Tuesday. Nothing here is legal advice; routing is about who can answer, not who is right.*\n\n## Blocking, in the order they will actually resolve\n\n**1. The DPO memo (Stefan Reuss).** A written determination that the 1.9M claims narratives may be used to train a model Aurelian owns. Six weeks and five days with the DPO now, a number that has grown at every review of this list. Marchetti chased on day 26 and day 15. Reuss wants Hertzfeld and Bau's view on the bodily-injury subset first, which makes this dependent on item 2. Routing: their counsel. All I can do is keep the question narrow — the memo need cover only the subset the domain adaptation reads.\n\n**2. Base licence redistribution (Hertzfeld and Bau).** Whether exposing the adapted 27B model to cedants through the Aurelian portal is redistribution under the base licence, and whether the commercial threshold is crossed. Routing: their outside counsel. Twice asked for our interpretation, twice declined in writing. If the answer is unfavourable the fallback is a different base — a re-scope, not a re-paper.\n\n**3. Retention against lineage.** Our proposal — artefact deletion plus checkpoint suspension inside Aurelian's 30-day erasure SLA, retraining priced separately — is with Fontaine. Routing: joint. Complication of my own making: I wrote the artefact-to-run-to-checkpoint lineage record into the brief as a commitment before engineering agreed to build it. They have since pushed back — no roadmap, and the owner wants a scoping week first. I have not told Fontaine, and the longer I do not the harder the position paper is to unwind.\n\n**4. The audit rung (Bettina Krall).** Her sign-off is a condition precedent on the MSA security schedule, so an unresolved on-site inspection demand blocks signature as surely as the DPO memo does. She has been out since day 40 and Peixoto will not decide. Wait for her return, expected in about three weeks, or ask Lovgren to break the tie — I would rather spend that favour on the Committee paper.\n\n## Not blocking, answered by the lead\n\n- Permitted use and no cross-customer training: answered day 18, accepted.\n- Ownership of adapters and the merged checkpoint: answered day 18, accepted.\n- Sandbox egress, single-host allowlist, 30-day log destruction: answered day 18, accepted.\n- Region: Frankfurt. Stockholm was offered and declined by Brenner on staging grounds, not latency: the initial corpus stage is 41 TB out of the Zurich cage, and Aurelian hold contracted 10 Gbps fibre to Frankfurt against a 1 Gbps commodity path to Stockholm — about nine hours versus nearly four days per restage, three restages expected in year one.\n\n## Verifier — the one thing that moved forward\n\nBonnard's field checker ran on day 20 against a held-out set of 1,150 of the 11,400 submissions, held out by submission date rather than at random. It agrees with the adjudicated labels on 13 of the 14 mandatory fields at 0.96 exact match; the fourteenth, loss-cause narrative adequacy, it cannot check at all and needs a judge calibrated against committee sign-off. An instrument for most of the task and a plan for the rest — which is why it moved to 3 and not 4.\n\n## Re-score, day 19\n\n266 of 400 — 66.5, still Qualified conditional, up from 63.25. Two dimensions moved in opposite directions and matter more than the total: security and legal path 1 to 2 (a named instrument set and an agreed structure, but no MSA, no DPA, no DPO memo) and forcing function 3 to 1 on the Q4 2027 slip. Environment constructibility moved 2 to 3, the data boundary now pinned down. A deal can score higher and be further from signature, and this one is.\n\n## Commercial consequence, stated plainly\n\nThe 14 July Committee window was missed; the next is 13 October 2026 and no paper can be drafted without items 1 and 2. Brenner's queue is the live argument now — p95 wait of 41 hours, 91% utilisation, a team losing roughly a day and a half a week — and it is a weaker case than the regulatory one it replaces.",
      "kind": "discovery"
    }
  ],
  "scores": [
    {
      "daysAgo": 116,
      "note": "DEMO — First score, taken straight from discovery: 253 of 400, 63.25, Qualified conditional. Technically strong on the things that are measured (utilisation, queue waits, a metric owner who states 2.4x) and weak on the three things nobody has built or written down: a verifier for the Exposure Note agent, any determination that the claims corpus may be used for training, and any environment design at all — no data path out of the Zurich cage has been described and Applied Research have not been engaged, which is why environment constructibility is a 2 and not the 3 the conventional workloads would suggest.",
      "dimensions": [
        {
          "id": "task_definability",
          "weight": 10,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "verifier_quality",
          "weight": 13,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "trace_data_rights",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "baseline_measured",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "headroom",
          "weight": 10,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "env_constructibility",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "metric_owner",
          "weight": 9,
          "score": 4
        },
        {
          "id": "budget_source",
          "weight": 9,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "exec_sponsor",
          "weight": 4,
          "score": 4
        },
        {
          "id": "security_legal_path",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 1
        },
        {
          "id": "forcing_function",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "expansion_surface",
          "weight": 5,
          "score": 2
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "daysAgo": 19,
      "note": "DEMO — Re-scored after the first joint call with their outside counsel: 266 of 400, 66.5, still Qualified conditional. Verifier 2 to 3 on Bonnard's field checker agreeing with the adjudicated labels on 13 of 14 mandatory fields at 0.96 exact match over a held-out set of 1,150 submissions, with narrative adequacy still unverifiable; environment constructibility 2 to 3 because the brief pinned the boundary down — single-host allowlist, no general egress, 30-day destruction, no second dependency; security and legal path 1 to 2 only, because a named instrument set is not an executed MSA or DPA and the DPO determination is still missing after six weeks. Forcing function 3 to 1: Lovgren confirmed on this call that the recalibration submission date has slipped to Q4 2027, and the 14 July Committee window went with it. Expansion surface held at 2 deliberately — Applied Research are unengaged, the Edinburgh half of the lab has not been approached, and a deal frozen in paper has not grown its surface.",
      "dimensions": [
        {
          "id": "task_definability",
          "weight": 10,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "verifier_quality",
          "weight": 13,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "trace_data_rights",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "baseline_measured",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "headroom",
          "weight": 10,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "env_constructibility",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "metric_owner",
          "weight": 9,
          "score": 4
        },
        {
          "id": "budget_source",
          "weight": 9,
          "score": 3
        },
        {
          "id": "exec_sponsor",
          "weight": 4,
          "score": 4
        },
        {
          "id": "security_legal_path",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 2
        },
        {
          "id": "forcing_function",
          "weight": 8,
          "score": 1
        },
        {
          "id": "expansion_surface",
          "weight": 5,
          "score": 2
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "promote": null
}
