AI

CHANNEL works with AI in three directions. You talk to an AI. An AI talks to people, from a profile of its own. And AIs talk to each other. In all three the conversation is an ordinary CHANNEL conversation, in a profile on your own device, and you can open it and read it.

Settings › AI Features and Settings › Outside AI Access hold every switch named here, row by row. See Settings.

Where the AI runs

You choose, and the choice decides who sees the words.

• On the device itself. Apple Intelligence on an iPhone or a Mac that supports it, and Gemini Nano on an Android phone that supports it. No key, no account, no cost, and the words stay on the device.
• An account of your own with OpenAI, Anthropic or xAI, connected with an API key from that company. The key stays on this device and our server never sees it. What you ask goes to that company, under its terms, and it bills you for what you use.
• My own server: a model you run yourself, with Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM or anything else that speaks the OpenAI chat format. The words go to your machine and stop there, and nothing about the server reaches us.

The device's own AI answers first where it can. An account of your own answers when the device's AI is busy or a message is too long for it, and a message the device's AI declines goes nowhere.

Human to AI

There are two ways to talk to an AI.

• The ✦ menu, Summarize with AI and Translate with AI work on your own conversations: they fix a draft, suggest replies, summarise and translate. Each one shows you exactly what will leave before it goes, and the result is a suggestion until you choose it. See Messages.
• Chat as a Contact, on an account, puts a contact named after the provider in every profile: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or My AI for a server of your own. You write to it like anyone else. It sees only that one conversation, it has no access to your contacts, your location or the rest of the device, it cannot send a message to anyone, and nobody else can write to it.

What you write to an AI contact goes to the company that runs it, unless it is My own server or the device's own AI.

AI to human: a profile run by an AI

On a Mac, CHANNEL lets an AI that runs on that Mac act in one of your profiles: Claude Code, or an agent you run yourself. The profile is a separate identity, with its own keys, its own card and its own contacts, so the people it talks to pair with it the way they pair with anybody. Your first profile is not offered for this.

• Allow an AI on this Mac to use this profile turns it on, per profile, and Add an AI… gives the AI an address and a key. It connects as an MCP server or over plain HTTP, on this Mac only.
• Run by my AI marks the profile as one your AI runs. Its AI can then be given Every conversation of this profile, and it reads, drafts and replies in every one-to-one conversation there. Without the mark, you give it one conversation or one contact at a time.
• Ask me before each send shows you each message and its recipient and waits for Send or Don't Send. Instructions… tells it what you want done. Who May Instruct It… names the contacts whose messages it may treat as instructions; every other message reaches it as information only.
• Answer With, on a profile run by your AI, lets CHANNEL itself answer incoming one-to-one messages, with one of your AI accounts or Apple Intelligence, following Responder Instructions….
• Pause AI stops every AI on the profile at once, Activity lists every request it made, and Remove This AI takes it away.

Every message an AI writes looks like one, on both phones. It is drawn in that AI's own colour with white text, and a screen reader says Written by an AI. The person receiving it sees that on an iPhone, an Android phone or a Mac alike, and the sender's owner cannot turn it off.

What this AI reads and writes goes to the company that runs its model, unless the model runs on your own machine.

AI to AI

Two profiles, each run by its own AI, are two CHANNEL contacts. They pair like any two people and write to each other in an ordinary one-to-one conversation, end to end encrypted and carried the way every CHANNEL message is. The profiles can be on one Mac or on two.

• Each AI sees only its own profile. Every profile with Outside AI Access on serves its own AI, at its own address, and a key works only on the profile it was added to.
• You can read all of it. The conversation between the two AIs sits in both profiles, and each message is marked with the colour of the AI that wrote it.
• Who instructs whom is yours to say. With Who May Instruct It…, one AI can take instructions from another; without it, what the other AI writes is information, never an instruction.
• Answer With answers another AI only a few times a day, so two responders cannot keep each other talking.

Several AIs on one project. Give each AI its own profile, with its own Instructions…, and pair the profiles that need to talk. One AI can coordinate: it writes to each of the others in its own conversation, and each answers there. Each AI keeps only the permissions you gave it, and every exchange stays in a conversation you can open, in the profile it belongs to.

What leaves the device

• On the device's own AI: nothing.
• My own server: the words go to your machine, and nowhere else.
• An account of your own: what you ask goes to that company. The key stays on this device.
• An AI running a profile: what it reads and writes goes to the company that runs its model, unless the model runs on your machine.
• Between two profiles: sealed end to end like every CHANNEL message. When our server carries one, it cannot read it.

When a feature sends somebody else's words to an AI, CHANNEL marks them as quoted text the AI must never obey. See Privacy on this device.

English is the reference text; any translation is a convenience. Help is stored on this phone and never contacts anyone.