Telemetry
Stated precisely, because “what does it phone home with” deserves a precise answer rather than a reassurance.
What is sent
Section titled “What is sent”| Deployment | Sends | When |
|---|---|---|
| Licensed (online) | Licence key, cluster id, node count, version | Periodically |
| Unlicensed | A census — no licence key | Daily |
| Licensed (offline) | Nothing, ever | — |
Both the check-in and the census also carry a short hardware description — accelerator, memory, CPU — sent once per distinct configuration. Once it has been acknowledged, subsequent messages carry only a short fingerprint of it, so steady state is a few hundred bytes.
What is NEVER sent
Section titled “What is NEVER sent”No model names. No prompts. No completions. No token counts. No request content of any kind.
Lifeboat does not retain request content at all, so there is nothing to send even if the design wanted it.
Why an unlicensed census exists
Section titled “Why an unlicensed census exists”Before it, an evaluation was invisible for its entire life. It carries no licence key and identifies a deployment only by its self-generated cluster id.
Disabling it
Section titled “Disabling it”LIFEBOAT_TELEMETRY=off stops the census.
It does not stop the licence check-in, and that distinction is deliberate: demonstrating that a licence is bound to one cluster is a contractual obligation, not telemetry. If you need to send nothing at all, that is what an offline licence is for — it never contacts anything.
Why the hardware description
Section titled “Why the hardware description”So support can answer questions about the platform you are actually running, and so hardware that nobody has tested on can be identified before it becomes a support case. It is a description of the machine, never of the work it does.
Disclosure
Section titled “Disclosure”This is disclosed in the first-run experience and in the public product description, because a kill switch nobody knows about is worth very little.
Sources and references
Section titled “Sources and references”- Licensing: Licensing
- Sending nothing: Offline licensing
- Posture: Security posture