Architecture
AIOS is a desktop application, not a browser tab pointed at someone else’s cloud. It runs its own local database, its own local vector store, and its own local model runtime. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you explicitly ask it to be.
The shell
A Tauri v2 desktop app (Rust + React + TypeScript) wraps a FastAPI sidecar running locally on your machine. The two talk over a local HTTP bridge secured by a per-launch random token and a host-header guard, so a stray webpage in some other tab can’t drive your own backend.
The data plane
- SQLite for structured data — chat history, documents, plans, agent runs, settings.
- ChromaDB for vector search over your own ingested corpus.
- Your OS keychain for API keys and the license token — never stored in plaintext.
Local inference
Ollama runs models on your own hardware behind a single-worker scheduler, so local VRAM never gets over-committed. Bring your own API keys for frontier models when you want them — AIOS doesn’t require a subscription to a hosted model to be useful.
Trust controls, specifically
- Per-launch local auth — a fresh random token gates every local API call.
- OS-keychain secrets — API keys and the license token are routed through your operating system’s own credential store, not a database column.
- Hard cost-cap kill switch — spend is metered token-by-token, mid-stream, on every model call.
- Approval-gated coding agent — the agent bridge only runs inside an explicit allow-list of repos, with a scrubbed environment, and only after you approve the plan.
- Prescreened sandbox execution — generated scripts are statically screened for network, filesystem-escape, and destructive calls, re-checked server-side every time.
- Offline license verification — licenses are signed tokens verified against a baked-in public key; the app never has to phone home to know what you’ve paid for.