How Lattice uses AI.

The short version

• AI is an assistant in Lattice, never the author of record. Every figure, status, and record in Lattice is computed and stored by the application from your data. AI features draft narrative, suggest matches, and answer questions about what is already there. A person reviews and approves anything that becomes part of the governance record, and staff keep every decision.
• Your content is not used to train any model. Under our providers' commercial terms, inputs and outputs sent through their APIs are not used to train or improve models.
• Lattice keeps nothing beyond the request. Lattice records a metadata-only trace of AI activity — which feature, when, how many tokens — and does not store the text sent to or returned from the model.
• You can turn it off. AI features can be disabled for your organization, and Lattice remains fully usable without them.

Who processes your content

Lattice uses two AI providers, and no others.

Anthropic, PBC (San Francisco, California), through its commercial API, produces the AI features you see — drafting narrative, answering questions, suggesting matches. Processing occurs in the United States.

Voyage AI produces embeddings: a numeric representation of a passage of text, used to find related plan content by meaning rather than by keyword. Where Lattice suggests that a project matches a policy, or that two passages say the same thing, an embedding is usually how it was found. The text of the passage is sent; nothing is returned but numbers, and the feature falls back to plain word-matching when it is unavailable.

Both are listed as subprocessors in our data processing terms, each with its processing location, and we give notice before adding another. No other third party receives your content for AI purposes.

Which features use AI, and what they see

Spark & Advisor, the in-app assistant. Sends your question and the plan, implementation, or budget records needed to answer it. Returns an answer with references to the records it used. Nothing is written to a record; the person asking decides what to do with the answer.

Council packet narrative. Sends the figures and statuses already computed by Lattice for the reporting period. Returns draft narrative in which every number is supplied by Lattice, not generated. Staff edit and approve before the packet is finalized; finalized packets are frozen and fingerprinted.

Alignment suggestions. Sends directive text and candidate project titles and descriptions. Returns a ranked suggestion of which project addresses which directive. A person confirms every link; nothing links automatically.

Import assistance. When an existing plan is brought in, sends text from the plan document for classification. Returns proposed structure and object types, shown for review. Staff review during import; the adopted text is never rewritten.

What AI never does in Lattice: it never edits adopted plan text, never changes a status, never moves money, never approves anything, and never writes to the governance record. Those actions are performed by people with the permission to perform them, and each is logged.

How long anything is kept

By Lattice: metadata only — the feature used, the account, the time, and token counts. The text sent to the model and the text returned are not stored.

By the providers: Anthropic retains API inputs and outputs for a limited period for trust-and-safety purposes under its commercial terms and then deletes them. Voyage AI's retention for embedding requests is stated in the same place. The current periods, and any zero-retention arrangement in place for your account, are set out in your data processing terms.

Turning AI off

A city that does not wish to use AI features can have them disabled for its organization. When disabled, the assistant is not shown, packet narrative is authored entirely by staff, alignment suggestions are not offered, and no content is sent to either provider. Every other function of Lattice — the plan record, implementation tracking, budget alignment, reporting, records export — continues unchanged. To disable AI for your organization, email support@civiclattice.com from an administrator account; the change is made within one business day and confirmed in writing.

What a city can say publicly

Some jurisdictions have adopted policies requiring disclosure when AI assists in producing a public document. Lattice supports that: council packets produced with AI-drafted narrative can carry an AI notice in the document itself, and because the underlying figures are produced by the application rather than the model, each can be traced to its source record.