HIPAA compliance at B3IQ

No government body certifies, endorses, or approves any product, vendor, or cloud service as HIPAA compliant. The Department of Health and Human Services runs no certification programme, and neither does any accreditor on its behalf. Every “HIPAA certified” badge on the internet is either self-issued or sold by a private company whose seal carries no regulatory weight.

What HIPAA actually requires of a vendor is concrete: a signed Business Associate Agreement, safeguards that are genuinely implemented rather than described, and a customer who has done their own risk analysis. This page is written against those three things. Where a control is not in place yet, it says so.

If you are a covered entity or a business associate, and a machine you own with us will create, receive, maintain, or transmit electronic protected health information, then B3IQ is your business associate and a BAA is required before that machine handles PHI.

This is true even though we cannot read your workloads. HHS guidance on cloud computing is explicit that a provider offering “no-view” services — one that maintains ePHI it has no ability to decrypt — is still a business associate. Encryption reduces risk; it does not remove the relationship. The narrow conduit exception covers mere transmission, like an ISP or a courier, and does not cover hosting hardware that holds ePHI at rest.

Two situations fall outside it:

• Ship-to-you machines. Every build can be shipped to your own facility instead of hosted with us. The machine lives under your physical controls, we do not maintain your ePHI, and no BAA with B3IQ is required for the hardware itself.
• Machines that never touch PHI. Plenty of workloads on this network are not regulated at all. A BAA is scoped to the machines you tell us will handle PHI.

We will sign one. If your machine will process PHI, request a BAA during onboarding or by writing to contact@npclabs.org. The contracting entity is NPC Labs, Inc., the operator of B3IQ. It is a negotiated document reviewed by both sides, not a checkbox in a settings page — expect it to be executed as part of your purchase, before the machine is provisioned.

We do not knowingly accept PHI onto hosted hardware without one. If PHI reaches a machine that has no BAA in place, tell us and we will treat it as an incident rather than quietly leave it there.

Coverage attaches to your machines and the path to them. It does not extend to the parts of B3IQ that deliberately involve other people’s hardware.

In scope under an executed BAA:

• Your hosted machine. The specific server you own, in its rack in our Eugene, Oregon facility — including physical security, power, networking, and the on-site engineering that maintains it.
• Private routing to your own machines. An API key scoped so that it routes only to hardware you own. No shared pool, no third-party GPUs.
• Encrypted private jobs. The private_transport path, where the request body is encrypted to your node's transport key and B3IQ relays ciphertext it holds no key for.
• Usage metadata and receipts. Request identifiers, timestamps, model, machine, token counts, latency, and status — the records we keep to meter and bill. They carry no prompt or completion text.
• Remote access to the machine. The per-machine SSH lane and any scoped, expiring support grant you approve for diagnostics.

Not in scope — do not send PHI here:

• The public, pooled network. Pooled inference routes to machines other people own and operate. Transport encryption terminates at the routing edge, and the operator running the model can see the content. Nothing is stored, but that is not the standard PHI is held to. A PHI workload belongs on your own hardware, on a private-scoped key.
• Earn mode. Switching a machine to earn mode makes it available to third-party traffic and disables its dedicated serving path. A machine that handles PHI must stay in its dedicated mode.
• The hosted playground. Conversations you start in the dashboard playground are stored server-side in plaintext so history works. It is a development tool. Do not paste PHI into it.
• Cloud fallback and third-party models. Requests that overflow to an external provider leave our infrastructure and that provider's terms apply. Private-scoped keys do not fall back.
• The marketplace. Renting capacity from, or listing capacity to, other operators is a multi-tenant arrangement by definition.
• b3iq.org itself. The marketing site, the analytics on it, and the “book a call” form are ordinary web surfaces. Do not put patient information in a contact form.

You own the machine, which means you own more of the stack than you would on a conventional cloud — and correspondingly more of the control. The split we work to:

Encryption at rest sits on your side because it is your hardware and your OS image. Ask us at build time and we will configure it with you — but the key is yours, and we do not want a copy.

Technical. Your API key routes only to your machines; isolation is physical rather than a policy toggle. Private jobs use an X25519 key exchange to the node’s transport key with AEAD encryption, and streaming responses bind a sequence number and final-frame flag into each frame’s authenticated data, so truncated, reordered, dropped, or replayed frames are detected. API keys and tokens are stored only as hashes. IP addresses and user agents appear in admin audit logs only as hashes, with the IP under a keyed HMAC. The per-machine SSH lane can be disabled from the dashboard, which refuses inbound SSH even where your fleet key is trusted elsewhere. Support grants are diagnostics-scoped, expiring, revocable, and are not authorised to reach raw prompt or output content.

Physical. Your hardware is a specific serial number in a specific rack in Eugene, Oregon, with N+1 power, 24/7 on-site engineering, and physical security — a facility you can name in a data-flow diagram and visit in person. The facility operator maintains its own physical-security and availability attestations, which we can provide during a security review. Managed Hosting insures the machine at replacement value.

Administrative. Per-request metadata is retained for 90 days and then deleted automatically; aggregate counters derived from it identify no individual request. Stored private-job ciphertext is purged after roughly 30 days, leaving a billing skeleton behind. We do not train on your prompts or completions, we do not sell them, and no human reviews them.

Evidence. Completed work commits to a signed receipt carrying model identity, machine identity, and token count — content hashes and counts, never the prompt or the output. That is an audit artefact you can hand to a reviewer without exposing anything a reviewer should not see.

B3IQ holds no SOC 2 or HITRUST report of its own today. The facility we host in holds its own attestations, and those are the facility's, not ours. We would rather tell you that than let a logo on a marketing page do the implying.

Confidential compute is not enabled. Our roadmap includes verified confidential execution backed by hardware attestation, and the routing layer is already fail-closed for it — a request asking for a verified confidential class matches no machine today rather than silently downgrading. Until the attestation verifier ships, the strongest privacy class we offer is encrypted transport to a machine you own.

Whoever operates a machine can see what runs on it. On your own hardware that is you. On the pooled network it is someone else, which is the entire reason PHI does not belong there.

Bring your security questionnaire to the call. We would rather go through it line by line than have you take a page like this at face value.

Under an executed BAA we will report security incidents affecting your ePHI to you without unreasonable delay, and cooperate with your own breach-assessment obligations. Report anything you see to contact@npclabs.org; if it concerns a specific machine, include its identifier from the dashboard and nothing else — do not send PHI in the report.

• A BAA with NPC Labs, Inc. is executed and names the machines in scope.
• Those machines are in their dedicated mode, never earn mode.
• Your API key is scoped to your own hardware, with no fallback to pooled or external providers.
• Encryption at rest and user access on the machine are configured to your policy.
• Your team knows the playground and the contact form are out of scope.
• Your own risk analysis covers this deployment.

The Privacy Policy covers what we collect and retain across the whole service. The privacy boundary and operator security pages in the documentation go deeper on what each layer can see and how credentials are handled, and the HIPAA reference carries the same material in a form you can send to a reviewer.

B3IQ is operated by NPC Labs, Inc. BAA requests, security questionnaires, and compliance questions go to the address below.