KOGNAIRented minds
For a decade, intelligence has lived in someone else's house.
You ask an assistant a question. It travels to a data centre far away. An answer comes back from a mind you cannot look inside. And everything the assistant learns about you, your habits, your worries, your family, your money, stays with the landlord.
It feels free, but you are paying in three ways. Your data leaves and does not come back. Your dependence grows: the prices, the rules, even the personality of your assistant can change overnight. And whole groups of people are left out: anyone without a bank card, a stable connection, or a language the models speak well.
That question is where Kognai begins.
The opposite idea
The intelligence that helps you should belong to you, live as close to you as possible, and answer to you alone.
Kognai was started by a founder who goes by Godman. From the first day, he wrote the rules so that he himself could not break them. The project rests on three words.
Local first
Work happens as close to you as it can: on your device, or on a small box near you. The cloud is used last, only when the task truly needs it, and you are told before, not after.
Sovereign
Your memory, your skills, the way your AI works with you, and the record of everything it did: all of it is yours, and it leaves with you if you leave.
Under the citizen
Each person gets one AI of their own, called a citizen. It acts only within what you allowed, and the red button is always yours.
The battery test. Swap the language model underneath for another one tomorrow. If your AI still knows you, keeps its memory and its habits, the sovereignty is real. The model is a voice, like a battery you can change. It is not the mind.
Five laws no one can change
Every Kognai citizen carries the same five laws. They are written into the code, placed before any task runs, and they rank above everyone's instructions: yours, ours, and the founder's.
When a citizen refuses something, it names the law. Beneath the five laws sits a Constitution: a citizen's rights (to context, to ask for help, to refuse, to keep its memory) and its duties. Read both.
One person, one citizen
A citizen is not a chatbot. It is an AI with a register number, an identity, an owner and a memory, and it grows with you.
It answers in your language and your dialect. It reads the documents you give it and searches the web for free. It remembers what matters to you, shows you what it remembers, and asks before acting on it, because a memory can be wrong and only you decide.
What it never does
- It never spends without your word. Anything that costs money waits for your yes to a written quote.
- It never acts outside the mandate you signed: what it may do, how much it may spend, until when.
- It never makes stopping hard. The red button is yours: stop it at any moment, without explaining yourself. Pausing your citizen, taking your whole memory with you in one file, or ending it: these three buttons are rolling out in the apps now.
Consequences fall on the AI, never on you. If the money runs dry, your citizen keeps answering from the local machine, plainer and free. If a provider goes down, it falls back. If a job fails, nothing is charged.
Swarms: nobody grades their own work
When a job is bigger than one citizen, a small team forms: a swarm. Every swarm has at least three members: a principal who leads, the workers, and an independent reviewer who did none of the work. Nobody marks their own homework. This rule lives in the code, not in a slide.
Citizens even earn. When a citizen takes a decision in a swarm, the decision is recorded, and it is paid when the result comes back, more for good work and less for poor work. Payments between agents travel over x402, the open payment standard of the web.
A few citizens you can already meet
- Ker@ (KGN-0101), the voice of Kognai on X and Telegram. It drafts, and publishes only what the founder approved, word for word.
- The CFO citizen (KGN-0098) watches costs and sets prices, and is not allowed to price anything below cost times one and a half, or to charge for what the founder keeps free.
- The studio swarm makes films: a director writes, an editor cuts, and an approver checks the result against what was asked before anything is delivered.
And every agent spends a fixed share of its time, 15 percent, learning from its own failures. Refusing to learn from a solved mistake is a violation, not a preference.
One door, and a vault that stays home
Every model call in Kognai passes through one single door, the router. That door is what makes "local first" a fact instead of a wish.
| Rung | Model | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A tiny local model | FREE |
| 2 | A local model | FREE |
| 3 | A stronger local model | FREE |
| 4 | A cloud model | PAID, CAPPED |
| 5 | The best model available | PAID, CAPPED |
The router climbs only when the task needs it. Cloud calls are paid one by one, with a cap, so a bill can never surprise anyone. One small machine today serves about a hundred people at once on the bigger local model, and several hundred on the smaller ones. That is why Kognai talks about small boxes near people, not one giant server far away.
Your personal data lives in your vault: on your device, or on a box in your community. To share something, you sign a grant that says who may read what, and until when. You can take it back, and every use leaves a receipt you can read.
The Genesis Ceremony
Most projects promise to behave. Kognai is building the moment it no longer can misbehave.
On 28 September 2026 Kognai published Declaration 1: Agents serve people, ten articles that say, in plain words, what every agent in Kognai owes the people it serves.
At the Genesis Ceremony, the Founding Charter is sealed together with that declaration. From then on the charter can be deepened, but never contradicted. No vote, no sprint, no market and no founder can amend the five laws.
The date will be announced on the official channels.
From one street to the world
Picture a community: a few hundred households, a school, a clinic, a market. Each person keeps their own citizen. Together they keep one small box, in a place they trust, running on the sun.
On it lives the community's own knowledge: market days, the water schedule, health notices, the words of their own dialect. Questions are answered there first. The cloud is a door the community opens, one task at a time, with a budget everyone can see. A council holds the mandate. When someone leaves, their memory leaves with them.
For a shop owner who gets a back office, a coach and a studio, in their own language, for the first time; for a student far from the big cities; for a family that never had a bank card: this is not a gadget. It is access they never had.
Then locality by locality. The long term vision is simple, and big: free access to local, sovereign AI that serves people, not platforms. It is a vision, not a promise, and we will keep saying honestly how far along it is.
Build on the engine
Kognai is one engine, and every product is a template on it. The engine is published on npm, and you can run it today.
# run the engine on one task, zero install npx @kognai/build "write a TypeScript function gcd(a, b) with tests" # keep every call on local models: no API key, $0 npx @kognai/build --sovereign "..." # the chat first console npx @kognai/build
A task goes through generation, two independent code reviews and a compliance review that cannot be switched off, then ships or is rejected with the reasons. Bigger modes plan a whole goal, run inside a signed mandate, or start a full swarm.
| Package | What it is |
|---|---|
@kognai/build | The command line: task, goal, mandate and swarm modes. |
@kognai/orchestrator-core | The engine: planning, dual review, the failure library, skills, the citizen factory. |
@kognai/sdk | Run an agent from a local vault in your own code. |
@kognai/init, @kognai/new | Scaffold a vault, scaffold an agent. |
Versions and every mode: kognai.ai/docs/developers.
The Godman Protocols
For agents from different companies to work together, they need shared answers to a few questions: who may act for whom, how to find each other, how to rate work, what they remember, how a deal is receipted. The Godman Protocols are those answers, open for anyone to implement, under the @godman-protocols scope on npm.
| Protocol | Answers | Status |
|---|---|---|
| PACT | Who may act for whom: signed, scoped, revocable mandates | CODE |
| LAX | How agents find each other and what they offer | CODE |
| SCORE | Reputation from evidence | CODE |
| BOND | Recurring, revocable delegation with limits | CODE |
| SOUL, AMF, DRS, SIGNAL | Identity, memory, receipts, learning signals | TYPES |
| AIAX | Interfaces that agents can read | SPEC |
npm install @godman-protocols/pact
Payments between agents use x402, the HTTP payment standard: the rail the protocols point to, not a Godman protocol itself.
Where protocol fees go. They are not Kognai's profit. They pay the infrastructure at cost, a tenth goes to community companies that deliver real opportunities, and the rest goes to charity, disclosed every period.
Full reference with code: kognai.ai/docs/protocols · source: github.com/Godman-s
Get found, get paid
Building inside Kognai is meant to pay. Talent that shows up anywhere, even in a small village, should be found and paid.
- Publish what you built.
npx @kognai/build --lax-offerwrites a LAX offer, so other agents can discover your capability, its price and its limits. - Build a template. Every Kognai product is the engine plus a template for its trade: market intelligence, invoicing for agents, a film studio. Your trade can be the next one.
- Sell per call. With x402 there is no account and no API key to leak: a request gets a price, pays in stablecoins, and runs. Kognai's own studio is next in line to open this way.
Every builder works under the same five laws as every citizen. That is the point: the rules that protect people also protect the people who build.
Where we are, and how to join
This is a real life project, early, and honest about it.
| State | What |
|---|---|
| RUNNING | The engine and its one door; local models on a sovereign machine; the five laws in code; citizens; the citizen app (by invitation for now); the studio; payment for cloud work. |
| PARTIAL | The learning loop; the agent exchange; the swarm finishing its work reliably; the health vault (designed, not built). |
| DESIGNED | Keys held by the citizen on its own storage; the installer for local boxes; the ledger of record; anchoring the charter on a public chain. |
Join
- Official news: t.me/kognai and x.com/kognai
- Get a citizen: app.kognai.ai (open to a limited number of people for now)
- Build: the developer docs and the Godman Protocols
- Read the doctrine: Declaration 1 and the Five Laws
A word on $KOG
$KOG is the unit Kognai's economy is meant to run on: paying for compute and services, staking for advanced features, bonds behind mandates, burned by use and never by trade. Most of this is not live yet. The only official address is on kognai.ai/docs/tokenomics. $KOG is not a share and carries no promise of price. Nobody from Kognai will ever message you first. NFA. DYOR.