This is the edge AI security problem nobody wants to talk about. In distributed systems, the trust boundary isn't where you deploy the model — it's where you ingest the data. Air-gapping the model layer while leaving ingestion infrastructure to three unaudited vendors is architecturally backwards. It's like encrypting your database but leaving the ETL pipeline over plaintext. The real solution for classified AI isn't bridging the air gap — it's running inference entirely at the edge, inside the classified perimeter, with models that never touch external infrastructure. That's where sovereign edge AI becomes a national security requirement, not a feature.