Force local backend selection when a services.confidential provenance block is present. Add a fail-closed ConfidentialAudioEgressError refusal at the audio-to-backend dispatch chokepoint so an explicit cloud override never egresses raw audio. Suppress the noise-to-Rev.ai upgrade and start the supervised parakeet server on the confidential lane; on refusal, honest-defer by holding raw audio with no failure event. Frames/text egress for thinking is unchanged. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>