Lion. The commit-time gut check.
Lion is the ~1B distilled-from-Griffin inline model. It runs locally inside the IDE, CLI, and pre-commit hook with sub-100 ms latency and zero source-code egress — so a developer never has to choose between speed and a real second pair of eyes.
Fast, local, never the bottleneck.
Three jobs in the editor. Sub-100 ms so the developer never disables it.
Inline sink detection
Catches obvious dangerous sinks — unsafe deserialization, SSRF-able URL builders, unsanitised SQL, command-exec, path traversal — before code ever reaches CI.
Sanitiser awareness
Flags weak or missing sanitiser usage in known dangerous flows. Knows the difference between a real allow-list and a check that looks like one.
Local-only inference
Model weights ship with the IDE extension and CLI. No source code, prompts, or embeddings leave the developer machine. Zero network egress required.
Griffin's reasoning, pruned to inline shape.
How Lion inherits Griffin
On the laptop, or not at all.
What stays on the developer machine
Before the queue ever exists.
Developer edits
Lion runs as the developer types and on every staged change.
Local inference
Sub-80 ms sink + sanitiser check, fully on device, no network call.
Editor surface
Finding shows up inline with a one-line explanation and the offending span.
Fix before push
Issue is gone before CI ever sees it. No queue, no triage tax.
Catch it inline, fix it in the editor, never spend a triage hour on it.
From label distillation to trace distillation.
How Lion was built, milestone by milestone, and what is on the bench right now.
First Lion prototype distilled from Griffin S.
The motivation was to get reasonable security-task accuracy into the IDE without round-tripping to a cloud model. The first prototype was distilled from a Griffin S (14B) checkpoint via straight label distillation — student matches teacher's final label on a curated prompt set. Latency on Apple Silicon laptops hit ~140ms p95. Accuracy was acceptable, but the trace-quality story was missing.
Trace distillation pipeline.
Plain label distillation forgot the reasoning shape the bigger model walked. The pipeline was extended to trace distillation: the student is supervised on both (input, final label) AND (input, intermediate reasoning trace) from the teacher. This is what gave Lion its accuracy at sub-100ms — the student inherits the reasoning steps, not just the answer.
Lion 1.0 GA.
Lion 1.0 shipped with the VS Code extension, distilled from Griffin L (70B) rather than Griffin S, with INT8 weights. Sub-100ms p95 on M-series Apple Silicon and recent x86 GPU laptops. Sink detection F1 on the held-out evaluation set crossed 0.78.
Signed weights + JetBrains + Cursor.
Lion weights now ship as signed sigstore bundles; the IDE extension verifies on install and refuses an unsigned weight file. JetBrains plugin (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, GoLand, WebStorm) and Cursor extension shipped. Identical inline feature surface across editors.
Current research direction.
Three tracks: (1) longer reasoning depth without breaking the latency budget — distilling deeper traces while quantising more aggressively; (2) language-specific Lion heads — a JVM-focused student, a Python-focused student, a Go-focused student, with shared base weights but task-specific fine-tunes; (3) sanitiser-quality scoring — moving beyond binary sink detection to a graded score of how robust the sanitiser path is.
Four constraints, one model.
Each design constraint Lion is built around, and what falls out of it.
Latency budget
Sub-100ms p95 because anything slower interrupts the developer's flow. This is the load-bearing constraint that drives the parameter count, the quantisation, and the runtime choice.
No source code egress
Lion weights ship with the IDE extension. Prompts and code never leave the developer machine by default. Air-gapped operation is supported with no additional install.
Signed weights
Every weight bundle is sigstore-signed. The extension verifies before loading and refuses to run unsigned weights. Lion doesn't ship through pip or npm.
Distilled from the production teacher
The teacher is the Griffin L variant currently in production. When the teacher changes, the distillation pipeline re-runs and the next Lion weight bundle ships with the IDE extension's next release.
Self-healing security runs on Safeguard.
Your first fix PR is minutes away.
No sales call required, even your agent can complete the purchase over MCP.