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Introducing Arfak
Product

Introducing Arfak

Meet Arfak — an open-source personal AI assistant you can run anywhere. Private, extensible, and built for everyone.

We're excited to introduce Arfak, an open-source personal AI assistant designed to put you in control.

Why Arfak?

Most AI assistants today live in the cloud. Your conversations, your data, your habits — all stored on someone else's servers. Arfak takes a different approach: you own everything.

  • Run it anywhere — your laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or a VPS. No vendor lock-in.
  • Fully private — zero telemetry, zero cloud calls by default.
  • Extensible — a plugin system that lets you connect any tool or API you already use.

What Can It Do?

Out of the box, Arfak ships with a core set of capabilities:

  1. Natural-language chat with configurable LLM backends
  2. File and document understanding for local knowledge bases
  3. Task automation through composable plugins

Privacy by Design

Privacy isn't an afterthought in Arfak. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

Every time you send a message to a cloud-hosted assistant, you're trusting a third party with the content of your conversations, metadata about when and how often you interact, and any files or documents you upload. Even with strong privacy policies, data breaches happen. Regulations change. Companies get acquired.

Arfak is designed around three principles:

1. Local-First Processing

All inference happens on your machine by default. Your prompts never leave your device unless you explicitly configure an external provider.

2. Zero Telemetry

There are no analytics endpoints, no crash reporters, no usage beacons. We don't know how many people use Arfak — and that's by design.

3. Transparent Data Storage

Every piece of data Arfak stores lives in a human-readable format on your filesystem. No opaque databases, no binary blobs. You can inspect, export, or delete your data at any time with standard tools.

Getting Started

Clone the repo and run three commands:

git clone https://github.com/tianzhou/arfak.git
cd arfak
pnpm install && pnpm dev

That's it. Open http://localhost:3000 and start chatting.

What's Next

We have an ambitious roadmap ahead - Follow along on GitHub and help us shape the future of personal AI.