# Who Owns Your AI?

*With ownAI, the data is already yours. The model is what we are working on.*

Download an open model, run it on your own machine, switch on airplane
mode: it keeps answering. It feels like independence.

It is borrowed. Whether there is a better open model next year, under what
license and with what capabilities, is decided by a handful of organizations —
nearly all of them in the United States or China — and by the governments
with authority over them. Self-hosting does not make the dependency
disappear. It only moves it to where you no longer see it.

ownAI's promise is "the AI that belongs to you." One half of that promise is
already true: conversations, memory, tools, self-written programs — everything
stays on your device, and nothing leaves your machine except the requests to
the model you chose. The other half no one has delivered yet, including us:
the intelligence itself comes, here as everywhere, from the hands of a few
makers. This text is about how we intend to change that.

## A single point of failure

The dependency can tighten at any time. Makers have already hardened licenses
and stopped publishing open weights; states already restrict, citing
security, which models may be freely released. A system whose whole purpose
is autonomy on your own device must not have a single point of failure at its
most important link.

But insurance is the weaker reason. The stronger one is what becomes
possible.

## The guild principle

A guild was an association of craftspeople who got better together without
any master handing over their secrets. Federated training makes exactly this
form possible again — for intelligence.

It works like this: every member trains on their own machine, on material
they chose themselves. Not a single document is shared — only a mathematical
distillate of what was learned, an adapter update smaller than a photo. The
distillates flow together into a shared model; the data stays home.

A legal-aid association would get a model that drafts in precisely its house
style, without a single client document ever leaving a member's machine. A
network of repair shops would get a model that knows thirty years of fixes no
manual ever recorded: the noise the error code does not explain; the
workaround for the part that is no longer made.

Nobody joins a guild out of idealism. You join because the exchange pays:
give one distillate of your own experience, receive the distillates of
everyone else's. The resulting model is better — at what the group actually
cares about — than anything you could rent. And it belongs to the people who
built it.

## The road there

We move in steps, and every step has to be worth it on its own.

**Today:** ownAI runs entirely on your device. Open models locally, or any
provider you choose; through its memory, your instance gets to know you over
time.

**Next:** the personal model. One person refines an open model on their own
machine, with their own material — and feels the difference in their daily
work. This is what we are working on right now. The results will appear
here, including the failures.

**After that:** the first guild. A small, hand-picked group merges what its
members trained. Every contribution is voluntary, holds for one round, and
can be inspected before it is shared.

**In the end:** decentralized training of entire base models over ordinary
internet connections. This is active research; models in the tens of billions
of parameters have already been trained this way, still far from the
frontier. If that research matures, guilds are how its results reach ordinary
people. And should the day come when no one may publish open weights anymore,
communities that can train together are the only way open models come to
exist at all.

## Why now

A race of closed, national AI systems leads to a dead end. The alternative is
open systems, built across borders, owned by the people who build them. You
can wait for them — or start. An AI that belongs to you is not one you rent.
It is one you help build.

Does that resonate with you? Anyone can [use ownAI](/download), build with us on
[Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/ownAI/ownAI), or follow the work on
[Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@janpawellek) and
[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/jan.ownai.com).