Philosophy

"People talk about the most personal sh*t in their lives to ChatGPT"

- Sam Altman

He's right. People bring their plans, their worries, their health, their relationships to a personal AI. And today, all of it lands on someone else's servers: handed to a stranger every time you ask for help.

Personal AI is too personal to be anyone's but yours. Eigin is built on that conviction: your agent runs on your device, its memory and knowledge stay with you. Nothing leaves unless you decide it does.

Large language models are becoming commodities. Choosing a model should feel like choosing a phone carrier or a utility company: pick one that works for you, switch when you want, take your stuff with you.

You bring the inference, Eigin manages the personal - on your device and under your control.

Eigin is free and open source, because personal AI is something that should belong to everyone. Our mission is funded by providing sovereign AI to institutions that need the same guarantees individuals do.

Principles

These are the principles that ground our decision-making.

They set what Eigin is and isn't, and where we put our focus.

Design for ownership

Eigin is local-first. Chats, knowledge, and settings stay on the device. Outgoing requests are ones you allow: inference calls to your chosen providers, and optional connectivity features. No tracking, no hidden incentives: Eigin serves you, not a platform.

A blank slate

No persona baked in. Eigin is opinionated about how it works, not about who your agent is. An agent starts without a fixed personality and shapes one around you as it learns who you are and what you need: its character is yours to mold, keep, or delete.

Model-agnostic

Bring your own key. Use Eigin Relay, any OpenAI-compatible provider, or run a local model with no network at all. Models are interchangeable utilities that don't significantly change the core experience.

Curated and simple

A personal agent, any provider, native apps, deep configuration: there's complexity here. Eigin abstracts the complexity with an opinionated implementation, so it works well on day one - for everyone, not just power users.

Built for daily use

Something you want to reach for - native apps that integrate with the OS, built to the standard of the platform they run on.

What Eigin is not

To know what you are, sometimes it's equally important to know what you're not. Eigin is:

Not SaaS

No subscription, account or lock-in. Eigin is software you run, not a service you rent: bring your own provider, keep your data, and leave or self-host whenever you want.

Not a model zoo

Not for benchmarking, comparing outputs or trying every possible model. For getting things done.

Not everything

We'd rather do a few things well than many things poorly. Our primary focus is on the local-first personal agent harness, model normalisation and conversation through voice and text.