Ancilla

Your sovereign personal AI.

The AI that lives in your house and answers only to you.

Ancilla Mission Control puts you in charge. Ancilla Bastion holds your data. Ancilla Nexus runs your models. Ancilla Aegis protects everything. Ancilla Beacon keeps you connected when the internet doesn't.

No central servers. No vendor lock-in. No surveillance. Yours, forever.

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in development   Five pillars under active build. Ancilla v0.0.1 ships when it works reliably end-to-end — no fake deadlines.

What if your AI was actually yours?

Today's AI tools send everything to someone else's server. Your inbox, your calendar, your photos, your medical records, your private conversations — all transit through infrastructure you don't control, used to train models you'll never see, governed by terms you didn't write.

Ancilla flips that. Your AI runs on your hardware. Your data stays on your storage. Your routing decisions happen on your machine. When you want to use a cloud model, you decide which one, under what terms, for which request — and you can see exactly what left your machine.

Built for sovereignty. Designed for decades. Open-source from the day it's ready to ship.

Ancilla’s five pillars

One integrated platform, not five tools glued together. Each pillar stands alone and runs the others. Names without the “Ancilla” prefix below when listed together; individually they’re always Ancilla Mission Control, Ancilla Bastion, Ancilla Nexus, Ancilla Aegis, and Ancilla Beacon.

Mission Control

Your single pane of glass. One cross-platform program that lets you see everything Ancilla knows, configure anything it does, and approve or revoke every access in three seconds. The human stays in charge.

Bastion

Your sovereign personal-data store. A single daemon that holds your life-log, messages, photos, financial records, calendar, contacts, health metrics, smart-home events — every long-term piece of you, in open formats that outlive the software.

Nexus

Your smart router. One API in front of ~15 local model backends, your LAN companion devices, your rented cloud GPUs, and (only when you turn them on) vendor APIs. Every routing decision is visible and audited.

Aegis

Your security shield. Wraps the OSS security ecosystem — vulnerability monitoring, anti-malware, supply-chain checks, AI-specific threats — under one operator UX. Sandboxes plugins, scans dependencies before install, audits after.

Beacon

Your connection of last resort. A mesh built on Reticulum that runs over LAN, Bluetooth, LoRa radio, USB sneakernet, even audio modem. Your AI doesn’t stop working when the internet does.

What makes Ancilla different

  • One platform, not five tools glued together.

    Most personal-AI stacks are duct-taped from independent OSS projects. Ancilla’s five pillars are designed as integrated peers under a single control plane — shared auth, shared config, shared data directory, shared trust model. You install one thing.

  • Most personal-AI tools ARE the agent. Ancilla is what the agent stands on.

    The tool you actually talk to — Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, or whatever you prefer — keeps working. Ancilla provides the layer underneath: your memory, your identity, your routing, your consent gates, your audit trail. Switch tools anytime; your decade of personal context shows up on day one for the next one.

  • Smart routing per request, not per app.

    Ancilla Nexus lets you decide local-first, cloud-first, or strict-local for any single LLM call — with a five-tier vendor trust classification and an opt-in local model that strips private data before anything leaves your machine. Cloud is opt-in per request, never silent.

  • Your identity is a key you hold, not an account on someone’s server.

    Every Ancilla install has its own cryptographic identity, generated on your machine the first time you start it. Two Ancillas verify each other directly — no central account, no email-and-password, nobody in the middle who could spoof you or lock you out. Share a calendar, hand off data to your heir, talk to a neighbour’s Ancilla over a mesh radio — all proven end-to-end with math.

  • Works when the internet doesn’t.

    Ancilla Beacon runs over LAN, Bluetooth, LoRa radio, USB sneakernet, even audio modem. Same architecture for “hiking weekend offline” and “Mars mission, six months no contact.” Your AI keeps working through ISP outages, blackouts, and disconnection that lasts as long as it lasts.

  • Built to outlive itself.

    Open file formats (Lance), raw blobs on disk, documented HTTP/JSON APIs. If Ancilla’s code disappears tomorrow, your data is still yours and still readable with nothing more than a filesystem.

  • Inheritance is a designed feature.

    A dead-man switch in Ancilla Bastion, Shamir shares for designated heirs, and cryptographic succession events your peers recognize. Your sovereign AI passes cleanly when you don’t.

What Ancilla does for you

Capture
Voice, text, screen, audio — never lose a thought. Multi-channel inbox with smart routing.
Memory
Decades of email, photos, calendars, locations, messages — one queryable, sovereign store.
Reasoning
Local models for routine, your rented GPUs for heavy lifting, cloud APIs when you pick.
Routine
Reminders, recurring tasks, digests, automations you author or share, transparent and revocable.
Privacy
Cryptographic identity. Sensitivity-aware sharing. Per-correspondent pseudonymity. Air-gapped option.
Resilience
Backup-first. Mesh networking. Inheritance built in. Designed to survive your laptop dying or you dying.

Apps built on Ancilla

Ancilla is the platform; apps live on top of it. The same APIs are open — build your own. The first three:

Ancilla Lens

The analyst. Turns your decades of data into patterns and narrative — productivity trends, relationship dynamics, decision archaeology, anomaly alerts, executive digests. Every insight cites its sources back to specific events.

Ancilla Health Hub

Your local-first replacement for Google Fit and Apple Health. Aggregates every wearable into one deduplicated metric store; lab PDFs get OCR’d; prescriptions and appointments cross-link to email and calendar.

Ancilla Home Assistant

Gradually retire Alexa and Google Home. Smart-home routines on your network, sensor data in Ancilla Bastion, voice commands routed through the same consent layer as everything else.

Common questions

Is Ancilla free? Will there be paid tiers?

Yes. Free. Apache-2.0. No paid tiers, no premium features, no subscription, no usage limits. Ancilla runs on hardware you already own; we never have your data to charge for. This exists to be useful, not extractive.

When does Ancilla v0.0.1 ship?

When the code works reliably end-to-end in daily use. The maintainer is the first user; release happens when one human can rely on it without regressions. No timeline before that. Follow Reddit or X for actual news.

How is Ancilla different from the AI tools I already use?

Most personal-AI tools are the agent — the thing you talk to. Ancilla is what the agent stands on: your memory, your identity, your routing, your consent gates, your audit trail. Whatever tool you already use — Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, your favourite IDE — keeps working and now inherits all of that automatically. You don’t migrate. You add a layer underneath.

Do I need to write code to use Ancilla?

No, eventually. The end goal is that Ancilla works for non-developers — install, configure via Ancilla Mission Control, daily-driver use without touching a terminal. The first release will be developer-shaped (it has to be), but the design is for everyone.

Why no cloud version? Why no hosted Ancilla?

Because sovereignty is the point. The whole reason Ancilla exists is so your data, your routing, and your AI memory stay on hardware you own. A hosted version would defeat that. If you want cloud LLMs, Ancilla Nexus can route to them on your terms — per request, per provider, with full audit and a local PII scrub before anything leaves your machine.

Can I use just one piece of Ancilla, or do I need everything?

One piece at a time. Each pillar stands alone. Run Ancilla Bastion as just a personal-data store. Run Ancilla Nexus as just an LLM gateway. Run Ancilla Aegis as just a security layer. They get much more useful together, but they’re not bundled into a monolith.

What about my data when I’m gone?

Inheritance is a designed feature, not an afterthought. Ancilla Bastion has a dead-man switch; Shamir Secret Sharing splits the keys to your designated heirs in physical or digital envelopes; a cryptographic succession event signed by reconstituted keys lets your peers’ Ancillas recognize the new owner. Your sovereign AI passes cleanly when you don’t.

Want to know when Ancilla ships?

Drop your email. You’ll hear from us when there’s something real.

Or just email hello at ancilla.live directly.

Where Ancilla is right now

  • In active development. Ancilla’s five pillars — Mission Control, Bastion, Nexus, Aegis, Beacon — under build, alongside a federated identity layer and the dispatcher that picks the right tool for each task.
  • v0.0.1 open-source release when the code works reliably end-to-end. The maintainer is the first user.
  • Follow along on Reddit (r/ancilla_live) and X (@ancilla_live). When the code drops, you’ll see it there first.

When Ancilla is ready, it will be free, Apache-2.0 licensed, and yours to run.