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Trellis

How the AI works

The models are the product, so here is exactly what they do

Trellis is model-agnostic and routes each step to the model that clears the quality bar for the least cost. This page is generated from the same configuration the product runs on, so what you read here is what executed.

Live routing

  • Map evidence to controlsgpt-4.1-mini
  • Write the gap in plain languagegpt-4.1-mini
  • Draft the missing policygpt-4.1-mini
  • Triage an incoming documentgpt-4.1-nano

The pipeline

Five steps, and two of them have no model in them at all

The steps without a model are the ones that make the steps with a model trustworthy.

Ingest

fast model

Whatever you paste is split into passages and each one is triaged: is this a policy, a ticket, a settings export, a chat log? Triage runs on the cheapest model that can read, because this step is volume work and does not need judgement.

Nothing is discarded. A passage Trellis cannot classify still goes to the mapping step.

Map

balanced model

Every control in scope is put to the model together with its criterion, its plain-language meaning and the evidence an auditor asks for. The model returns a status, the gap, the evidence it saw, the evidence still needed and a supporting quote.

The prompt is explicit that silence means missing, intent does not count, and no numeric score may be produced.

Verify

no model

This step has no model in it. Quotes are matched against your submitted material verbatim after normalising whitespace and quote characters. Fragments under eighteen characters are rejected outright. Anything unfound is dropped and the finding is labelled unsupported.

A control returned as met with no evidence named is downgraded to weak here, in code, with the reason shown to you.

Score

no model

Readiness is arithmetic on the statuses. Met counts one, weak counts a half, missing counts nothing, divided by the controls in scope.

We never ask a model for the number, because a number a model invented is a number you cannot defend to an auditor.

Draft

balanced model

The largest open gap is drafted into a real document: purpose, scope, the policy itself, the evidence retained, and the three fields reviewers always check, which are owner, effective date and review cadence.

Drafts must not claim you already do something. Unknown specifics come back as bracketed placeholders so it is obvious what to fill in.

Model-agnostic

The candidate set, and why it exists

Keeping routing in configuration rather than in prompt strings means a provider changing price, rate limits or terms is a configuration change and an evaluation run, not a rebuild.
ModelProviderTierRouted forUSD / 1M tokens
gpt-4.1liveopenaifrontierlong policy sets, contested control judgements, multi-framework overlap$8.00
gpt-4.1-miniliveopenaibalancedcontrol mapping, gap wording, policy drafting$1.60
gpt-4.1-nanoliveopenaifastdocument type triage, deduplicating evidence$0.40
claude-sonnetdeclaredanthropicfrontiercareful reading of long policy text, draft tone$9.00
gemini-flashdeclaredgooglefastbulk ticket triage, screenshot and settings extraction$0.50
llama-opendeclaredmetaopenself-hosted deployments, customers who cannot send data out$0.30

Live means a key for that provider is configured in this deployment and the adapter is wired. Declared means the model is in the routing table behind the same interface and switches on when a key is present. If every provider is unreachable, a run falls back to a deterministic offline analyser and the result says so on its face, rather than failing or quietly pretending.

Limits

What this cannot do

Every one of these is a real limit, not a modest way of describing a strength.

It can be wrong about a control

Trellis assesses 22 controls from text. A policy can say the right words and describe something nobody does. Our answer is to default to missing and to make you name the evidence, which makes the product feel harsher and makes it more useful.

It cannot see what you did not give it

If your best evidence is a screenshot in someone's downloads folder, Trellis will call that control missing. It is right to. An auditor would too.

It does not watch your infrastructure

Trellis reads what you bring at the moment you bring it. Continuous drift checks are on the roadmap and are not here yet.

It is not an auditor

No output of this product is an audit, a certification or an opinion. A licensed CPA firm does that, independently of you and of us.

Read how we handle your material

Retention, subprocessors, deletion and the training question.