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 — no source, no answern/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

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.

Test the claim yourself.