Explainer · 02

What does private mean?

“Private” gets stuck on a lot of AI products. Most of the time it means a setting, a plan or a contract. Here it means something narrower and easier to verify: the model runs on a machine you own, and your words never leave it.

Three things people call private

When a cloud AI service says private, it usually means one of these:

  • A setting. A toggle that asks the provider not to use your chats for training. Your messages still travel to their servers and are still processed there.
  • A plan. Business and enterprise tiers often come with stronger commitments about retention and training. Better — but still a promise about data that sits on someone else's computer.
  • A contract. A signed agreement with legal terms. The strongest of the three, and still an agreement about what another company will do with your information.

All three can be perfectly adequate. None of them change where your data goes.

What private means here

The model — the software that actually does the thinking — is installed on a computer in your home or office. When you ask it something, the answer is calculated on that machine. Nothing is sent out to produce it.

  1. No account

    There's no login with an AI company, so there's no profile of your usage attached to your name somewhere.

  2. No usage log elsewhere

    Your conversations are stored on the machine's own drive. Delete them and they're gone — there's no copy on a server you can't see.

  3. No terms that can change

    Nobody can update a privacy policy on hardware you own.

How to check it yourself

You don't have to take our word for it. Unplug the network cable or switch off Wi-Fi, then ask the machine a question. If it answers, the answer came from the box on your desk.

We'll do exactly that with you on install day.

What private doesn't mean

  • It isn't protection from a stolen machine. Like any computer holding sensitive files, it needs a login and disk encryption so a lost or stolen machine doesn't hand over what's on it.
  • It doesn't make other apps private. Paste an answer into email or a cloud document and that copy follows the rules of wherever you pasted it.
  • It isn't the same as disconnected. The machine can still sit on your network for updates. Private describes where the thinking happens, not whether the cable is plugged in.