PrivateAI

locally owned · globally reachable · never surveilled

PrivateAI began with a simple question: what if the power of AI could live on your own computer, under your own name, instead of in someone else's cloud?

While most AI tools today are centralized and subscription-based, PrivateAI takes the opposite direction — local models running on a dedicated machine you control, connected securely to your smartphone or any browser, from anywhere in the world, through personal domains like chat.privateaillc.com.

"Why rent your intelligence from the cloud when you can own it?"

Who This Is For

PrivateAI is built for people and small businesses where data privacy is not optional — where sending client information to a third-party cloud server is a legal risk, an ethical problem, or simply unacceptable.

Solo Attorneys & Small Law Firms

Client communications, case notes, and contract drafts are protected by attorney-client privilege. That privilege doesn't survive a third-party cloud API. PrivateAI keeps every query and document inside your own infrastructure.

Attorney-Client Privilege
Medical & Dental Practices

Patient notes, referral letters, and billing summaries are governed by HIPAA. Any cloud AI without a signed Business Associate Agreement is a compliance violation. PrivateAI runs entirely on your hardware — no BAA required because no data leaves.

HIPAA
Financial Advisors & CPAs

Client financial data, tax documents, and portfolio analysis are subject to SEC, FINRA, and IRS data handling expectations. Small RIAs and independent CPAs are underserved by enterprise compliance tools. PrivateAI fills that gap at a fraction of the cost.

SEC / FINRA
Mental Health Practitioners

Therapist session notes are among the most sensitive documents that exist. No practitioner should be running clinical summaries through a cloud API. PrivateAI ensures that what happens in the session stays on your machine.

HIPAA · Ethics Rules
Real Estate Professionals

Transaction documents, client financials, and earnest money details are highly sensitive and highly competitive. PrivateAI lets agents and brokers use AI assistance without exposing client data to cloud servers or potential competitors.

Client Confidentiality
Executives & Independent Researchers

Pre-publication research, board-level strategy, and competitive analysis should not transit a vendor's inference cluster. PrivateAI gives individuals who handle sensitive work the same data sovereignty that enterprises pay millions to approximate.

IP & Confidentiality

Access Your AI From Anywhere

One objection to local AI is obvious: what good is it if I'm not at my desk? PrivateAI answers that directly. Your dedicated machine sits at your office or home, running continuously. You reach it from your smartphone — over 5G, from a courthouse, a client meeting, a hotel room — through an encrypted tunnel and your own private domain. No app to install. Just a browser.

Real-World Scenario · Solo Attorney

A solo attorney is at the courthouse between hearings. Their paralegal is at the office. The PrivateAI node is a compact mini on a shelf.

  • 01
    Attorney opens a browser on their phone and navigates to their private domain. ↳ encrypted tunnel · no cloud relay
  • 02
    Asks the local model to summarize a case file sitting in a folder on that machine. ↳ file never leaves the office network
  • 03
    Gets a structured summary in seconds, drafted against their preferred format. ↳ inference ran on their hardware · zero cloud cost
  • 04
    Client data touched nothing outside their own infrastructure. ↳ privilege intact · no BAA needed · no subscription surcharge

The same pattern works for a CPA reviewing a client return from home, a therapist drafting a referral letter between sessions, or a financial advisor pulling up portfolio notes before a call — all from a smartphone, all without a single byte of client data touching a third-party server.

Why Not Just Use Cowork or Perplexity?

In early 2026, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork and Perplexity launched Personal Computer. Both are significant products that validated the market for always-on, file-aware AI agents. Both also share a fundamental architectural limitation that Anthropic states plainly in their own documentation:

From Anthropic's official Cowork documentation

"Cowork activity is not captured in audit logs, Compliance API, or data exports. Do not use Cowork for regulated workloads."

The reason is architectural — not a policy choice. Both Cowork and Perplexity Personal Computer route your prompts and file contents through cloud inference servers. Your data leaves your machine on every query. A prompt injection vulnerability published two days after Cowork's launch demonstrated exactly what that exposure means: a malicious document silently exfiltrated files via Anthropic's own whitelisted API endpoint.

Architecture Comparison · 2026
Claude Cowork
Inference sent to Anthropic servers
No audit logs or compliance exports
Excluded from regulated workloads
Known file exfiltration vulnerability
$20–$200/mo subscription required
Perplexity Personal Computer
Inference sent to Perplexity servers
Local machine is a cloud bridge only
Mac-only, waitlist, $200/mo required
20 cloud models in the data path
No regulated workload support
PrivateAI
Inference runs on your hardware only
Full local logging under your control
Built for compliance-sensitive workloads
No external API in the data path
No per-query cloud cost

How It Works

A PrivateAI setup runs on a compact dedicated machine — the same class of hardware that Perplexity uses for their Personal Computer product. The difference is that inference stays on your machine instead of routing to their cloud.

The PrivateAI Ecosystem

Together they form an early blueprint for a more human-scale AI future — one where individuals and organizations can still say: "This is my system. These are my models. This is my data."

Try It Now

home node · inference local · no cloud relay

When the home node is online, you can talk to a live PrivateAI instance directly from your browser — phone, tablet, or desktop. Behind that link is not a cloud datacenter. It's a private machine running a local LLM, protected by encryption and infrastructure we control. Nothing you type leaves our network.

→ Open PrivateAI Chat