Cloud, local, or neither.

Three honest options. One of them is not using AI at all.

In plain words

Three ways to work with AI, side by side: everything in the cloud, everything on your own computer, or no AI at all.

Which one is sensible depends on how sensitive your files are. Sometimes "no AI" is the right answer — and we say so.

No competitor names, no invented scores — just where each option puts your data.

Cloud AIa hosted assistantProvenizelocal-first with proofNo AIthe status quo
Where your files liveon the vendor’s serverson your machineon your machine
What a model seeswhatever you pasteyour question and the quoted snippetsnothing
Answer carries a sourcesometimesalways — file, page and how well it matchesn/a
Proof of what happenedvendor logs, if anya chain you can recalculate yourselfyour own notes
Erase and still prove itdeletion is a promisekey destruction, chain intactnothing to erase
Works offlinenoyes, with a local modelyes
Speed of adoptionfastestinstall and configurenone needed
Setup effortnonereal: install, index, learnnone
Maturity todaymature productspre-1.0n/a
Vendor dependencyhighmodel-agnosticnone
If the vendor has an outageyou cannot look anything up or check anythingyour own machine keeps runningunaffected
Walking away with your datalog and history stay with the vendoropen file format on your own disknothing to unlock

Do not send your evidence somewhere else to prove it was not tampered with.

When you are better off without AI
  • Cloud AI is fine when the material is not confidential and no one will ask you to prove anything.
  • No AI is fine when the work is small enough that recall and search are not your bottleneck.
  • Provenize fits when confidentiality and provability are both non-negotiable — and you can live with pre-1.0.
Frequently asked questions

Is local AI not much weaker than cloud AI?

The largest models run in the cloud, and we name that difference honestly. But for searching and summarising your own documents, a local model is more than enough — and the only one that makes no copy of your file.

What does cloud AI cost me in control?

You do not know exactly where copies live (text versions, search indexes, back-ups), you cannot verify erasure yourself, and the answer to "where does it say that?" depends on the vendor.

Can I simply use no AI at all?

Certainly — that is the third option in the comparison, and sometimes the right one. You lose speed in search work, but no new risk arises either. We cannot make it more honest than that.

From the blog

Can you trust an AI answer without a source? — why an answer is only worth something once you can see where it says so. And: is your data really gone at an AI vendor?

Test the claim yourself.

Check the proof