Free vs. EU AI Act Mode: Choosing How Your Data Gets Processed

Every workspace runs in one of two modes, and it's a real setting, not a marketing label — it changes which AI providers are allowed to handle your tasks and what happens to your data before they see it. Most teams only need to think about this once, at setup, but it's worth understanding what actually flips.

Free mode: optimized for price

In Free mode, the router is allowed to send a task to whichever available provider handles that class of work most cheaply — that can include non-EU providers when they're the strongest price-to-quality option. Contact and identifier data is stripped from the text before any provider sees it regardless of mode, so this isn't a privacy-off switch; it's a routing-scope switch. For most internal, non-regulated work, this is the mode that keeps cost down without giving up anything you'd actually notice.

EU AI Act mode: optimized for compliance posture

Switch a workspace to this mode and the router drops every provider we consider unsuitable for EU-regulated work from consideration entirely — it will pick a more expensive eligible option rather than fall back to a cheaper excluded one. To be precise about what this is not: our providers are US-based, so this is control over who may process your task and a record of who did, not processing inside the EU. That redaction applies here too, and on top of it, the specific model that handled each task is logged and visible to you, so you can answer “which system produced this” after the fact, not just assert that something reasonable happened.

How to decide

• If the work touches customer data, regulated processes, or anything you'd need to explain the provenance of later, use EU AI Act mode for that workspace.
• If it's internal tooling, drafting, or anything where cost matters more than provider jurisdiction, Free mode is the reasonable default.
• You're not locked in — the mode is a workspace-level setting, switchable at any time, and it applies going forward from when you change it.

The honest caveat: this setting controls where and how your tasks get processed on our side. It is not a substitute for your own legal assessment of what the EU AI Act requires for your specific use case — talk to counsel for that. What this gives you is a concrete, switchable, auditable setting to point to, instead of a paragraph of marketing language promising compliance in the abstract. And since this article argues you should demand specifics rather than slogans, here is ours: the redaction catches structured identifiers — emails, phone numbers, IBANs, VAT and tax codes, card numbers — and it does not catch personal names written in free text. If a name matters, write “the client” instead.