Cornerstone · the architecture
The operating system for the home. Owned by you.
Governed AI is the first app, not the whole product. The same hardware that keeps your family’s AI at home becomes your private data vault, a fault-tolerant home mesh, encrypted backup only you can read, and — if you want it — a system you can run entirely without us. This page lays the whole thing out, honestly, including the parts we haven’t built yet.
🔊 Hear this page — in my own voice
Rather read with your ears? The whole architecture, in my own cloned voice — the short version, “explain it like I’m 10,” a TL;DR, for-kids and for-grandma reads, a personal note, and the devil’s-advocate take.
The promise underneath it
We can never read your data.
Not “we promise not to.” We can’t. Your family’s private content is encrypted on your own device with a key only you hold; we — and any storage provider — ever see nothing but sealed bytes. There is no master key on our side, no back door, no “reset” that lets us in. The test is one question: can anyone but you turn it back into plaintext? The answer has to be no, and the reason has to be math, not a policy.
The honest cost: if you lose your key, we can’t rescue your data — because if we could, we could read it. That trade is the whole point. Anything less and “you own your data” is just marketing. The core of this — the encryption itself — is already built, openly tested, and now wired into a working vault: you can seal a note in your own browser and read back, on the same screen, the exact ciphertext our server holds — no plaintext, no key, nothing we could turn back into your words. Try it → Verify it →
Loving oversight — never surveillance.
Cornerstone starts as a governed AI for your kids: you see that it’s used and set the rules, per child. But “parents can read their kid’s chats” is right for a little one and corrosive for a teenager. So visibility decays toward autonomy as a child grows — full transparency for a five-year-old, concerns-only for a fifteen-year-old — while a genuine safety concern always reaches you, at every age. Privacy applies to ordinary conversation; it never applies to a real danger. This part works today, for your own family.
The layers of a home you own
hot → resilient → cold → sovereign
The vault — your photos and documents, on hardware you own
Notes vault live · photos + hardware nextThe same device that keeps your family’s AI at home is where your photos and documents live. The honest competitor to the big photo clouds on the one axis they can’t match: it’s physically yours, in your house. The encryption seed is live today — a working, browser-sealed notes vault you can open on any account; photos, documents, and the owned hardware are what it grows into.
The device mesh — more than one, so nothing is a single point of failure
Software mesh live · box = future nodeYour own devices become redundant nodes: each holds an encrypted local replica of the vault and can restore it if our servers vanish. More devices with a copy = harder to ever lose — no special hardware needed. A Cornerstone box is just a future always-on node you’d add to the same mesh; put one at a grandparent’s and it’s off-site resilience without a cloud.
Encrypted cold backup — the last resort, only you can read
Software-buildable nextBeneath the mesh, an off-site backup to cold storage for fire, theft, or losing every box at once. Encrypted before it ever leaves your house — so the backup provider (and we) hold nothing but sealed bytes.
The sovereignty tier — run the whole thing offline, without us
RoadmapFor the family that won’t rely on us either: the whole thing packaged to run entirely on your own device, no dependency on our servers. The data and the compute are yours — it runs on your box, not our cloud, and you can watch every connection it makes.
No big platform offers any of this, because their whole model is your data in their cloud. Taking this position would mean giving families their data back — which is exactly why it’s open.
What’s real today — and what isn’t
- Working now: the parent governance console — age-graded oversight over your kids’ AI, for your own family.
- Working now: the encrypted vault — seal notes, photos, and documents in your browser and see for yourself that our server stores only ciphertext. Recovery phrase, trusted-device unlock, a family-held backup file, and an optional managed off-site copy all included.
- Working now: the device mesh — your own devices as redundant nodes, each holding an encrypted local copy that can restore the whole vault. No special hardware; a box would just be another node.
- Built + tested: the encryption core behind it all — an open, golden-tested library, with a route that refuses to even receive a key.
- Designed, not built: the fully self-hostable build and the vault on dedicated home hardware you own. These are the road ahead.
We’re building it for our own family first; wider release waits on getting the child-safety and privacy review right, not on whether it works.
Why we’re publishing the whole thing
Every part of this — the design, the promise, the layers we haven’t built — is here on purpose, in the open. Not because it’s finished, but because it should exist. If a bigger company reads this and ships it before we do, that’s a win, not a loss: it means families got the thing that’s theirs. We’d rather this be built by someone than kept secret so we could be the only ones who could.
A home you actually own shouldn’t be a competitive advantage anyone gets to hoard. So we’re writing it down, and we’re building toward it. Come with us, or take it and run — either way, it exists now.