Commitment
Air-Gapped Ownership
Who owns your AI? On Recursion's sovereign path: you do — hardware, runtime, and the data on it.
How it works today
Who owns your AI today
Your provider does. The weights live in their cluster. Your prompt is a request on their network. Rate limits, outages, price changes, and acceptable-use rules are theirs to set.
“Your” assistant is a session on someone else's GPU. Files you upload for context are copies in their object store. Fine-tunes, if you get them, often still sit in a tenant you do not physically control.
Frontier agents can be capable in that setup. They cannot be yours. Capability without ownership is a lease.
Data path — today
The prompt leaves your machine and runs on a hosted GPU farm you do not own.
How Recursion does it
Frontier agents on hardware you own
Sovereign Courier and Scout workloads run air-gapped on Macs you own and manage. The model is a process on Apple Silicon in your space — office, studio, or rack — not a tenant in ours.
We literally cannot access our customers' Macs, even if we wanted to. Because of that, we have no idea how much usage Scout users and customers generate. Opacity to us is ownership for you.
Yes, frontier-class agents can run this way. That is the point of the lab: capable local runtimes, not a chatbot that only exists while the API key works.
Data path — Recursion
Inference stays on your Apple Silicon. Recursion has no remote into the machine.
Ownership commitments
- Local Scout and Courier inference is designed to run on hardware you possess and administer.
- Recursion does not require a persistent tunnel into your Mac to serve those workloads.
- We do not operate a dashboard of your local token counts, because we do not receive them.
What you still control
- Which models you load, when the machine is on, and whether it is networked at all.
- Backups, disk encryption, and who physically can sit down at the Mac.
- Whether you also use Courier Cloud for other workloads — same software, different ownership mode.