AI for defence export control.
Thylon classifies your products, screens your counterparties and drafts your licence applications under ITAR, EAR and EU dual-use rules — with an audit-ready reasoning trail your compliance officer signs off in minutes, not weeks.
Defence tech moves fast. Export control doesn’t.
Before you can ship a demo unit, email a spec sheet abroad or hire an engineer from outside the EU, you have to answer one question: is this controlled? Getting it wrong isn’t a fine — it’s personal liability for your directors. Getting it slow kills deals.
The specialists don’t exist
Export control officers are among the scarcest hires in defence tech — the primes locked them up decades ago. Startups fall back on outside counsel at €400 an hour, for research a machine can do.
One regulation, 27 interpretations
EU dual-use rules are implemented by 27 national authorities, each with its own forms, precedents and processing times. Add ITAR and EAR the moment a US component or customer touches your product.
Weeks of research per determination
A single classification means reading control lists, decoding technical parameters and documenting every step — because in an audit, the paper trail is the defence. Most teams track it in spreadsheets. Until the audit.
Every open question blocks something
Every week a classification sits open, a shipment, a hire or a contract waits with it. Compliance shouldn’t be the slowest system in a company built for speed.
Meet your AI export control analyst.
Thylon does the 95% of export control that is research and documentation, so your people only do the 5% that is judgment. It reads your technical documentation the way a senior classifier would — then shows its work.
Drop in a datasheet
Upload a spec, CAD export or product description. Thylon extracts the technical parameters that matter for the control lists.
Get a determination with receipts
Jurisdiction, the exact control code and a step-by-step reasoning chain citing every parameter it checked — including the near-miss entries it ruled out.
Sign off and file
Your compliance officer or counsel reviews and approves. Every determination, screening and licence draft lands in an audit-ready record.
Illustrative determination. Thylon is a co-pilot, not an autopilot — a qualified human signs every call. What it replaces is the twenty hours of list-reading behind each one.
Everything on the record. Nothing on a spreadsheet.
Live views from across the platform — every check cited, every state auditable, every flag raised before it becomes a violation.
14 technical values read from datasheet.pdf Cited
Military-list entries checked and ruled out Cited
Imaging parameters against Category 6 control text Cited
Sensor type outside scope — basis on record Cited
Determination locked; export file ready for audit Signed
Offer draft received from HR
2 repositories carry 6A003 technical data
Licence or general authorisation to be in place first Flagged
Live product views — shown here with demo data.
One platform. Every clearance covered.
Specialised agents run on every datasheet, counterparty and hire, each working from your company’s own rulings library — so every determination lands with full context, not as an isolated guess.
Classify
Reads your technical documentation against ITAR, EAR and Annex I — and returns a control code with every parameter cited.
Screen
Checks every counterparty and new hire against the sanctions lists — continuously, with alerts when the lists change.
License
Drafts complete BAFA, ECJU and BIS/DDTC applications from data you’ve already entered — ready for your officer to review and file.
Why Thylon exists.
Export control was built for the primes of the last century, not the builders of this one. Thylon turns it into software — so democracies field better defences faster than the closed regimes that threaten them.
Deterrence is built by the many
The free world’s security now runs through thousands of startups and suppliers, not a handful of primes. The tooling has to meet them where they are.
Speed is security
Every week a shipment, a hire or a contract waits on paperwork is an advantage conceded to those who don’t play by rules.
Trust must be provable
Non-red by construction, EU-hosted, every determination on the record. In defence, claims mean nothing; records mean everything.
Founder
Bio to come — Thylon is building quietly while onboarding its first design partners.
Questions, answered straight.
Can an AI really classify controlled goods?
It researches them — it doesn’t decide. Thylon reads your technical documentation against the control lists and produces a reasoned determination with every parameter cited. A qualified human reviews and signs off. You get the speed of software with the accountability of a professional.
What if a determination is wrong?
The same thing that protects you with a human classifier: the documented reasoning and the human review step. Unlike a spreadsheet, every assumption is visible and challengeable before sign-off — which is exactly what authorities look for in an audit.
Which regimes do you cover?
US ITAR and EAR, the EU Dual-Use Regulation (2021/821), and national military lists starting with Germany (AWV/AWG) and the UK — with more national regimes on the roadmap.
We already work with a law firm.
Keep them — for the 5% that is genuine legal judgment. Thylon does the research, screening and drafting they currently bill by the hour, and hands them a file ready to review.
Is our technical data safe with you?
EU-hosted, encrypted, tenant-isolated, never used for model training. We treat your specs as what they are: controlled technical data.
We’re too early for this.
If you have one foreign customer, one non-EU engineer or one US-origin component, you’re already in scope. Starting clean is cheap; retrofitting compliance after a violation is not.
Your next export shouldn’t wait on a spreadsheet.
Thylon is live with its launch cohort — the next seats open by application. Tell us what you’re shipping.
Launch cohort full · applications reviewed in the order received