On-Premise AI Code Review: How We Deployed Claude Locally in an Air-Gapped Environment (Setup Guide)

The security officer said no. Not "maybe with some modifications." Not "let us review the data handling policy." No. Cloud-hosted AI code review was not going to happen in their environment. The codebase contained classified material. The network was air-gapped. No data leaves the building. End of conversation. This was a defence contractor. Their development team was writing code that couldn't touch any external API, any cloud service, any SaaS platform. But they were also writing 200,000+ lines of code per year with a team that was struggling to maintain review quality across twelve engineers, the exact problem that AI code review solves. The challenge: deploy AI code review capability that runs entirely on-premise, in an air-gapped network, with no external connectivity, while meeting the security and compliance requirements of a classified computing environment. This is the guide we wish existed when we started that project. It covers hardware requirements, model selection, inference server setup, CI/CD integration and the security architecture that made it pass the compliance review. Why air-gapped AI code review is different from everything else Most AI code review guides assume cloud connectivity. The model runs on the provider's infrastructure. The code is sent via API. The review comes back. The security question is about data handling policies, encryption in transit and vendor trust. In an air-gapped environment, none of that applies. The model runs on hardware you control. The code never leaves your network. There is no vendor to trust because there is no vendor in the loop. This sounds simpler from a security perspective. In some ways it is. In other ways it's significantly more complex because you're now responsible for the entire stack, model selection, quantisation, inference hardware, deployment, monitoring, updating and maintaining the system that in a cloud deployment is someone else's problem. Hardware requirements The hardware question is the fir