In one paragraph
Saphan Studio is a control plane that dispatches AI coding agents to a fleet of machines you own.
Saphan Studio is a control plane that dispatches AI coding agents to a fleet of machines you own. Its model rests on four decisions. A human decides, always — the engine routes work and generates artifacts; it never approves a merge and never treats a timeout as consent. Nothing is trusted because it says so — machines are admitted by an explicit owner act with a certificate binding, every order a run receives carries a person's passkey approval, and a machine's claim about what it can do carries a provenance grade. The record is the system — governance registries are Ed25519-signed append-only logs, and the human-readable files are projections of them. When a control cannot be enforced, the run does not happen — a missing sandbox facility, an unreadable policy value, an unadmitted machine, or an ambiguous target are all refusals with named reasons, never a silent fallback to a weaker posture.
Who this document is for
Two readers: an evaluator deciding whether to let agents run on their machines, and the administrator who operates the controls.
What the risk actually is
If you have run continuous integration, you know most of the shape: a control plane sends work to machines, and those machines run code.