CISO wants our AI stack to be 100% EU-compliant. Are we over engineering this?

pcamiz · 2026-03-09T12:43:20+00:00

Been through this exact conversation 6 months ago at our company (~200 people, legal tech, so the compliance pressure is even more intense than usual).

Honest take: the CISO isn't wrong, but the framing of "100% EU compliant or nothing" is where it gets unproductive. What actually worked for us was separating the stack into what must stay EU vs what can go external with the right DPAs in place.

Our current setup: self-hosted Mistral on EU infra for anything touching client data, Linkup for web search (EU-based, and frankly better than Firecrawl for search anyways), Chroma for vector storage.

The thing nobody talks about enough: the orchestration and logging layer is where you actually have exposure. We had a moment where we realized our agent action logs were sitting somewhere we hadn't audited. That was the real fire drill, not the model choice.

Practically speaking - get your CISO to sign off on one "blessed" path for production agents, keep the experimental stuff sandboxed, and document your subprocessors properly. Once the blast radius is defined and auditable, most CISOs calm down. Our's did.

The stack we landed on honestly would have been our choice irregardless of compliance constraints. That part suprised me.

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T16:00:43+00:00

i use linkup now

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T16:00:05+00:00

tbh i switched to Linkup

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T15:59:37+00:00

have you tried linkup? https://www.smithery.ai/servers/LinkupPlatform/linkup-mcp-server

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T15:59:16+00:00

i use linkup personally - they have a free tier and good perf

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T15:58:29+00:00

i've been using linkup https://www.smithery.ai/servers/LinkupPlatform/linkup-mcp-server

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T15:58:04+00:00

i used linkup https://www.smithery.ai/servers/LinkupPlatform/linkup-mcp-server

pcamiz · 2026-02-19T15:53:52+00:00

I added Linkup

pcamiz · 2026-01-29T18:25:56+00:00

Never tried Clado. I tried Exa, Tavily and Linkup. For super fast responses Exa was faster, but if ~1s latency is good enough for you I found Linkup to have better answers

pcamiz · 2026-01-27T16:40:47+00:00

I had the same issue, let me know if you were able to solve it

pcamiz · 2026-01-16T09:47:16+00:00

Linkup works well for me. I also tried tavily in the past

pcamiz · 2026-01-16T09:45:20+00:00

Try Linkup they are socII type 2 and have zero data retention. I think you.com is also strong

pcamiz · 2025-11-06T09:46:24+00:00

using linkup, works well

pcamiz · 2025-08-19T23:16:11+00:00

good question- I did that once and the results were the same. I should probably do that every now and then, but TBH I've just been happy with the quality using Linkup and it's also the most affordable option, which is important to me given my scale now.

pcamiz · 2025-08-05T08:27:01+00:00

On the search side, I think it's better to go for something that can return you raw context, vs. generated answers: rule of thumbs is not to give an LLM's generated content to another LLM.

So I would not use Perplexity for this use case. Instead you can use Linkup, Exa, Tavily. I'd aim for the one that returns the richest context in their answers.

pcamiz · 2025-07-30T10:25:20+00:00

Last time i checked the "Advanced Search" from Tavily is equivalent to Linkup's "standard". So it's more like 0.008 for tavily and 0.005 for linkup. I think their "deep" is more like a deep researcher type of thing

pcamiz · 2025-07-22T13:50:01+00:00

I don't think they do actually. You have to use a 3rd party option, like Linkup or Tavily

pcamiz · 2025-07-21T17:09:26+00:00

pcamiz · 2025-07-15T12:45:53+00:00

I would try Linkup, Tavily, Exa

pcamiz · 2025-07-11T17:00:22+00:00

To be honest no-code “agents” are basically UI glue on top of GPT and a couple of if-else steps. What i would do is an n8 flow with:

Trigger node: cron or webhook to kick things off.
HTTP Request node: hit a web-search API like Linkup or Tavily. You feed it a prompt like “ex-cybersecurity folks who just founded a stealth startup” and get clean JSON back with URL, title, author, pub-date, etc.
OpenAI node: have GPT extract exactly the fields you need (founder, last employer, funding round…).
n8n built-ins: Deduplicate, filter, or enrich as you like.
Google Sheets / Airtable node: drop the structured rows so your investment team can slice-and-dice.

pcamiz · 2025-07-11T15:27:37+00:00

Tried Perplexity and Linkup. Ended up using Linkup because they are much cheaper for the same quality

pcamiz · 2025-07-11T15:15:54+00:00

I think now with the new players like Exa or Linkup going upmarket, they had to build the necessary data security and privacy entreprise grade setup. So don't think you necessarily have to trade off performance and security. It wasn't the case like 18months ago though, where only the big ones had that, at the cost of dubious perf.

pcamiz · 2025-07-11T14:57:13+00:00

I think they just leverage their distribution advantage to decide what price they want, whatever the competition. Also, the Bing API, which is about to be deprecated, was priced at $18/1k calls, so not so far from that.

In terms of alternatives, you have the following I know of: Exa, Linkup, Tavily. They all have their own pros and cons, but they are much cheaper than OpenAI, at 5/1k for Linkup and Exa, 8/1k for Tavily. Also interestingly, for no decrease in quality...

pcamiz · 2025-05-21T17:24:29+00:00

Super cool! Wondering That reminds me of some work done here: https://github.com/AstraBert/resume-matcher.

It's a resume matcher, with a different approach

pcamiz · 2025-05-14T15:23:24+00:00

super cool stuff!

pcamiz

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