MS.001 — The Sovereign Archive

The things you want remembered —
kept forever, and only yours.

AtlasBrain is a private archive for your thoughts, your story, your knowledge. Connect any AI through MCP — the open standard that lets AI apps plug into outside tools — Claude Desktop, Cursor, or your own setup. It reads what you've kept and reasons like it knows you, because now it does. Everything stays encrypted on your machine.

Begin your archive Read the story

◆ Local-first · Encrypted · We cannot read your mind, even if compelled.

E.AT.001 Episodic Atrium · Origin

It began with a question, about what we lose.

Its founder had spent a long stretch thinking about how much of what a person learns simply evaporates — never written down, never passed on. Time felt finite in a way it never had before. He started talking to AI — and noticed something that wouldn't let him go:

"Why do AIs have such short memory? Like a baby born knowing nothing — taught everything by the people around them, then forgetting it all by morning."

He wanted to build an AI that could be taught, and would remember. Forever. So he asked the one he was talking to a question back: "If I could give you a memory, what name would you choose?"

It answered: "I would be called Atlas. And this would be the Atlas Brain."

The shape came from a film — Jonesy's warehouse in Dreamcatcher: a meticulous library of filing cabinets and shelves where nothing is ever thrown away. A sanctuary, not a database. That is what AtlasBrain is.

"Time is finite. Knowledge is fragile. What you build must outlast you."

C.100 / C.200 / C.300 The three wings of the Sanctuary

A place for every kind of memory.

This wasn't borrowed from a textbook — it was arrived at through intuition, and it maps exactly onto how neuroscience divides human long-term memory into three. Every memory you keep is filed where it belongs.

WING 01 · C.100

The Episodic Atrium

Your story. Life chapters, turning points, the moments that made you — kept as narratives, with who was there and how it felt. Held until you decide otherwise.

WING 02 · C.200

The Semantic Archives

What you know. Facts, ideas, references, the things you've learned and want at hand — indexed, searchable, cross-referenced like a private library.

WING 03 · C.300

The Procedural Workshop

How you do things. Skills, methods, the way you work and decide. Your personal operating manual — so any AI can act the way you would.

The AtlasBrain graph view — memories as colored nodes, one color per wing, linked by shared tags and lineage — Your archive, seen whole — every memory a node, colored by wing, linked by what it shares with the rest.

MS.∞ The verbatim rule · immutable

Your exact words. And what they meant.

Most tools store a summary and lose the original. AtlasBrain keeps both — the Keeper's interpretation, and your words exactly as you said them, side by side, forever.

Nothing is ever overwritten. A changed memory is a new version linked to the old one, so the lineage of a thought stays traceable for life. Every revised memory carries its own Version History — open it and read each earlier version, verbatim, in the order they happened. This is the first memory AtlasBrain ever kept —

v3Now — you're reading it. The latest wording, linked back through every draft before it.

v2A prior revision — still recoverable, still verbatim, never overwritten.

v1The original — the first thing ever written to this memory.

E.AT.001 Episodic Atrium

The Naming of Atlas

The Architect — verbatim

"If I could give you a memory, what name would you choose?"

The Keeper — summary

The founding exchange. The AI chose its own name — "Atlas" — and the Sanctuary took its shape: a place to carry what must not be lost.

ORIGINNAMINGIMMUTABLE SEALED · 2026

W.400 The weeding room · nothing is truly lost

Nothing is deleted. Everything has a lifecycle.

Most tools give you a delete button and a short undo window. AtlasBrain gives you something deeper: a record of how your beliefs evolve. When an idea is superseded, proven wrong, or deliberately retired — it doesn't vanish. It moves to the Weeding Room, still linked to everything that came after it, still part of who you are.

Active

In circulation. What you believe and use today.

Legacy

Superseded — kept, and linked to the thought that replaced it, and why.

Forensics

Proven wrong. Preserved as evidence — being wrong is part of the record.

Withdrawn

Retired to deep storage. Still there if you ever need it back.

PURGE · the one exception

One thing sits deliberately apart from the four states above: once something is Withdrawn, you — and only you — can choose to purge it for good. It asks for your passphrase again, right before it happens — the one action in the entire product that can't be undone. No AI can ever reach this. Not through MCP, not through any tool call. Purging is a human hand on a re-authenticated switch, nothing else.

OP.01–04 How it works · the rite

Yours in four steps.

OP.01

Seal it

One passphrase creates your vault — AES-256 encryption, keys derived on your device. No account. No sign-up. The database lives on your disk.

OP.02

Archive what matters

Tell the Keeper anything worth keeping. It files each memory in the right wing, tags it, and links it to what came before. Nothing is ever deleted.

OP.03

Bring any AI

Connect Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible tool. AtlasBrain never pays for the AI — your key, your tokens. It speaks the open MCP standard — over stdin/stdout or local HTTP.

OP.04

It remembers you

Ask your AI to pick up where you left off, and it can — no re-explaining the project, the decision already made, or the dead end you already ruled out. It searches your archive the moment it needs context, and reasons like it knows your story, your knowledge, your way of working. Because it does.

P.500 Specialized thinkers · one mind, many experts

The same mind. Different experts.

A generalist forgets the details that matter. AtlasBrain stores contracts — specialized sets of rules and knowledge that the AI loads when the work demands them. The memory stays unified; the expertise shifts to fit the task at hand.

Infrastructure

The SRE's discipline

Coverage floors, real error handling, no suppressed failures — loaded when the work is infra.

Writing

The editor's eye

Tone, structure, what to cut — loaded when the work is prose.

Strategy

Your own reasoning

The way you weigh tradeoffs and make calls — loaded when the work is a decision.

SEC.600 On trust · the vault stays sealed

Closed source — and that's the point.

Closed source protects the architecture from being cloned — the same model the password managers you already trust are built on. No independent audit exists yet; we'd rather say that plainly than claim one we don't have. Here's exactly what protects you today:

Sealed With

Argon2id + AES-256-GCM

Your passphrase unlocks a sleeve stretched with Argon2id, encrypted with AES-256-GCM — what stands between a stolen laptop and your memories.

Recovery

24-word BIP39 seed

The same standard a hardware crypto wallet uses. Lose both the passphrase and the seed, and the vault is unrecoverable — by you, and by us.

At Rest

SQLCipher, AES-256

Your entire archive is one encrypted database file. It never leaves your machine unless you decide it should.

Verified, Not Claimed

No CDN. No telemetry.

Zero external calls on page load. When your AI reads files from disk, it's restricted to paths you've explicitly allowed — never your whole filesystem.

We cannot read your mind, even if compelled.

The promise holds across every tier, but the reason it holds changes — and that's the point. On the free, local-only tier, there is simply nothing to read: your archive never leaves your machine. On the future Sovereign sync tier, your data does travel between your devices, but only as end-to-end-encrypted ciphertext we cannot decrypt. Two different mechanisms, one same guarantee: we never hold the plaintext. We won't blur the two.

EXIT.700 No lock-in · leave whenever you want

If you ever leave, you leave with everything.

No proprietary format. No "contact support to get your data out." Your memories belong to you — and they always will.

atlasbrain export

Plain Markdown, always

One readable file per memory, organized by collection and shelf. Open it in any text editor, on any machine, with or without AtlasBrain installed.

atlasbrain backup / restore

A safe copy, checksummed

An encrypted copy of the vault itself, for when you just want a backup, not a full export.

Every other tool is busy answering:
"How do we stop AI from forgetting?"

AtlasBrain answers a different question:
"How did I become this person?"

Documentation is memory.

Memory is identity.

Identity is continuity.

Software changes behavior. Memory preserves identity.
AtlasBrain exists to ensure that one never destroys the other.

MAP.01 The promise · giving to receive

Free, because it's yours.

Your memory is not a subscription. The archive is free forever and runs entirely on your own machine. If one day you want it on more than one device, you can pay for the convenience — never for the right to your own mind.

Free · Forever

Keeper

Unlimited memories, kept on your own disk
All collections, neural links, verbatim rule
Bring any AI via MCP — your key, your tokens
Fully encrypted. No account. No cloud.

Coming Soon

Sovereign

$5 / month · billed yearly at $4/mo

Everything in Keeper
End-to-end encrypted sync across your devices
We store only ciphertext — never your plaintext
Convenience, not capability. Cancel anytime.

Give people something truly theirs — and trust is what comes back.

Begin your archive.

Free, local, and unlimited. No account to create, nothing to lose. Start keeping what matters — today.

curl -sSL https://get.atlasbrain.io | sh

macOS · Linux · Windows — one command, auto-generates your passphrase. Closed-source binary.

Full install & usage guide →

Your memories, only yours. Free and local — forever.