FOI (Freedom of Information)
Statutory regimes requiring public-sector bodies to disclose recorded information on request — drives audit-trail and explainability requirements for AI systems used in public-sector decision-making.
What FOI (Freedom of Information) means in practice
Freedom of Information regimes — UK FOIA 2000, US FOIA, India RTI Act 2005, and equivalents in most democracies — require public-sector bodies to disclose recorded information on request. The implications for AI in public-sector use are substantial. Every record of every AI-driven decision is potentially subject to disclosure: the prompts, the model outputs, the reasoning traces, the eval results, the model lifecycle artefacts. Public-sector AI deployments must therefore design audit substrates that are both fully captured and disclosable, which substantially raises the bar relative to private-sector deployments. The MindMap public-sector deployments use a content-addressed audit store designed to satisfy FOI replay obligations from day one.
Related terms
Sovereign AI →
An architecture where customer data never leaves the network perimeter, model weights run on customer-controlled hardware, inference logs stay in the customer's SIEM, and the entire stack can operate air-gapped.
Evaluation (evals) →
Systematic testing of an AI system against a curated set of inputs to measure quality on the dimensions the business cares about — accuracy, faithfulness, safety, format.
Article 14 (Human Oversight) →
The EU AI Act provision requiring high-risk AI systems to be designed for effective human oversight, including the human's ability to fully understand, decide not to use, and override the system's output.
More in this category
The Sovereign AI Playbook.
Enterprise generative AI that runs on your servers.
- 01Definition. The four non-negotiable properties of a sovereign deployment — and the three patterns that look sovereign but aren't.
- 02Why now. Three forces that converged in 2026: regulator pressure, the open-weights capability gap closing, and unit economics flipping.
- 03Reference architecture. The five-layer stack we deploy: applications → agent runtime → sovereign LLM → RAG + KB → data stores. With model and tooling choices for each.
- 04The regulators. SAMA · RBI · UK ICO · EU AI Act · DPDP · HIPAA — what each requires and how it maps to architecture.
All 62 terms, in plain language
Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.