Security

Last updated: 26 August 2026

The goal of this page is narrow: to let you verify our claims from the architecture itself, rather than take our word for them.

The short version

Cognitive Atoms runs on your device and stores its core records locally. Your captured thinking is not held on our servers, so there is no copy of it for us to read, lose, subpoena, or sell. That is a property of how the system is built, not a promise about how we behave.

Where your cognition lives

On your machine. The runtime processes and stores your records locally, and no cloud account is required for it to work. There is no cloud relay for your captured thinking, no background sync to us, no telemetry, no advertising profile, and no sale of your data.

Because we never hold your cognition, deletion is not a request you have to trust us to honour. Remove the Cognitive Atoms data on your device and it is gone — we have no copy to delete. Details are in the Support page and the Privacy Policy.

How capture actually works

Nothing enters the system on its own. Every record follows the same path:

You choose

A conversation, a selected passage, or a note. Cognitive Atoms does not monitor your screen, record meetings, or scrape your workspace.

You review

You see what was captured before it is saved. Nothing is written to your record without passing in front of you first.

It is stored locally

The record is written to your device, where it stays.

You carry it forward

When you choose to work with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another provider, Cognitive Atoms prepares the relevant context. It does not send messages or take actions for you.

Fidelity: nothing invented

What Cognitive Atoms shows you back is quoted from what you brought it. It does not summarise your thinking into a claim you did not make, score you, or infer traits about you and present them as fact.

This is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. A system that invents confident conclusions about how you think is not preserving your reasoning — it is replacing it with its own. Where we show you something, you should be able to trace it back to the words you captured.

Provider independence

AI providers are tools you choose, not owners of your memory. You connect your own provider account or key and it stays on your device — we never receive it, and we do not resell provider access.

This is also what makes the continuity claim real rather than rhetorical: because your record is local and provider-independent, switching from one model to another does not reset you to zero.

What this does not protect against

Being straight about the boundaries matters more than a longer list of assurances.

Your device is the trust boundary. If your machine is compromised, or another person has access to your unlocked device, your local records are exposed. Local-first moves the risk to you — it does not remove it.
What you send to a provider is governed by that provider. Once you carry context into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, their terms and retention policies apply to that content. We cannot extend our guarantees into someone else's system.
Your waitlist email is held by us. It is the one piece of data we do hold, and it is unrelated to your cognition. Write to privacy@cognitiveatoms.com to remove it.
This is early software. The beta is evolving, and we would rather tell you that than imply a maturity it has not earned yet.

Reporting a security issue

Please write to security@cognitiveatoms.com rather than disclosing publicly. We will work with you, and we will not pursue good-faith research.

It helps to include what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. Please do not send us the contents of your captured cognition — we do not need it, and we would rather not have it.

The principle underneath all of it: your thinking should remain yours — portable, inspectable, and useful over time. Where we can make that structural rather than promissory, we do.