How Base Drive earns the trust a USB drive needs

A USB drive from a small company you have never heard of deserves suspicion. Our Base Drive page (opens in a new tab) agrees. It says that asking why you should plug a stranger's USB drive into your laptop is the right thing to ask, and then answers it.

First, the status. As of October 2026, Base Drive is coming soon at a planned $19.99 and cannot be ordered yet. It works with Apple Silicon Macs and Windows 11 PCs, and our terms (opens in a new tab) treat every specification below as a current target. For the product itself, read Base Drive, private AI for the laptop you already own.

Plugging it in runs nothing

Step one of setup on our How it works (opens in a new tab) page reads: "Connect the drive to a supported Apple Silicon Mac or Windows 11 PC. Nothing runs automatically."

The Base Drive page says it more bluntly: "Nothing hidden executes when you plug it in."

You open the drive, look at what is on it, and run the installer when you decide to, after you have checked the files.

Every file is listed

Our Base Drive page says the installer is open source, and every file on the drive is listed. The site's simplified view shows six items, from the installer to a VERSION.txt file, and Base Drive, private AI for the laptop you already own lists them all.

SHA-256 checksums, checked before anything is copied

A checksum is a fingerprint of a file. Our page describes SHA-256 checksums as "short fingerprints that change if a file is altered in any way." Change a single byte of a model file and its fingerprint comes out completely different.

Setup checks the published SHA-256 checksums before it copies anything onto your laptop. A swapped or damaged file fails to match.

You can run the same check yourself with tools that come with your computer. On a Mac, in Terminal:

shasum -a 256 /path/to/file

On Windows, in PowerShell:

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 C:\path\to\file

Compare the long string it prints with the published checksum for that file. A match means the file is the one we put there.

The warning your laptop will show

The Base Drive installer "isn't signed with Apple or Microsoft yet," so the first run shows the standard "unidentified developer" warning. The exact words depend on your system: on a Mac, a message that Apple could not verify the app, which you can allow in System Settings > Privacy & Security; on Windows, SmartScreen's "unknown publisher" warning. Signing and notarization work is still in progress.

Signing is how an operating system confirms which developer an app came from. Notarization is Apple's extra check on Mac software. Until both are done, the warning is accurate: your computer cannot yet confirm the installer came from us.

For now, the full file list and the checksums are how you confirm it yourself. Our page puts it this way: "you can inspect every file before you run anything." Our About page (opens in a new tab) says "We'd rather under-promise," and telling you about the warning before you see it is part of that.

After setup: no account, and it works offline

The installer copies the models onto your laptop so they run at full speed with the drive unplugged. Step four of setup is "Unplug the drive," because Base Drive is only needed for setup.

From then on, per the Base Drive page:

• There is no account, no telemetry and no usage meter.
• The chat app talks to the model only on localhost, inside your own machine, "so nothing you type leaves your laptop."
• After setup you can turn Wi-Fi off and it keeps working.

The Wi-Fi test is the easiest to run: turn it off, open the chat and keep asking. If answers keep coming with the network off, your laptop is writing them.

Web search and cloud escalation are planned for Base Drive and are not part of the shipping build. What zero data retention means, and where it stops covers the provider terms behind that design, and Why we make local the default for private AI explains why off is the starting position.

Updates arrive on a new drive

New models and improvements arrive as a fresh drive. In the site's words: "Nothing updates itself behind your back."

The About page states the same rule for the whole company: "No telemetry, no quiet updates, no hidden cloud calls." For a careful person, this means the software you checked on day one stays the software on your laptop until you choose to run a newer drive.

The trade-off: improvements reach you more slowly than through an app that updates itself overnight. We think that is right for software that reads your private writing.

What no drive can protect

A local AI keeps your words on your laptop, so they are only as safe as the laptop itself. Our terms put the limit plainly: Offline Base "cannot protect data on a machine that is already compromised, shared, unencrypted, or physically accessible to someone else." The next sentence reads: "Local means the data is yours to secure, and securing it is your job."

Each word in that list points to something you control:

• Compromised: keep your operating system updated and be careful what else you install.
• Shared: use your own login on the computer.
• Unencrypted: turn on the disk encryption your computer offers.
• Physically accessible: lock the screen when you step away.

Some choices you make also send data off your laptop. The terms say that turning on outside help, web search, remote access or any planned integration sends data off your machine, and that anything you paste into the demos on our site leaves your machine by definition.

For more on the people we build this for, read Building AI for people who are wary of AI.