Model Studio is built to keep what it produces on the machine that produced it. This describes what that means in practice, and what it does not cover.

Everything the app generates or imports is sealed before it reaches disk, with ChaCha20-Poly1305 and a per-file subkey derived by HKDF. The index of what exists is encrypted too, so filenames and prompts are not readable from the filesystem. In-progress Board manuscripts, cast data, panel briefs and corrections are stored in that encrypted index as well, rather than browser preferences. The key that wraps the rest is derived from your passphrase with Argon2id, or held in the macOS Keychain behind a biometric access control when the build is signed with a team identifier.

Plaintext exists only in memory, and only while a model needs it. Source images are decrypted into a private staging directory for as long as a job runs and removed afterwards, including on failure. Staging directories carry an application-specific prefix and stale remnants from a process crash are scavenged at the next engine start.

Nothing is sent anywhere. There is no account, no API key, no telemetry, and no cloud inference. The only network traffic is model downloads, which go to Hugging Face and are initiated by you.

• An unlocked app on an unattended machine. The vault auto-locks after fifteen minutes of inactivity; before that, anything open is readable.
• Your passphrase. There is no recovery. A forgotten passphrase means the vault cannot be opened, by us or by anyone.
• A compromised machine. Malware running as your user can read the keys from memory while the vault is unlocked. This is a privacy tool, not a defence against local code execution.
• The models themselves. Weights are downloaded from Hugging Face and are whatever their publishers made them. Nothing here inspects them.

Open a GitHub issue for anything that is not itself sensitive. For a problem that would put users at risk if described publicly, use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting on this repository instead.

Please include the macOS version, the Mac's chip and memory, and the steps that reproduce it. A crash log from ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports helps if there is one.