Cloister AI
Confidential AI, offline.
A general-purpose AI assistant whose models and private-work processing run on your iPhone. Built for the work you cannot paste into a cloud chatbot — contracts, case notes, session notes, payroll, board papers. No account and no remote AI inference. Optional web search, URL imports and requested asset downloads are clearly disclosed.
- Platform
- iOS
- Requires
- iOS 26
- Devices
- iPhone. Larger open-weights models require compatible Metal hardware and available storage.
- Pricing
- Completely free. No subscription, paywall, trial, in-app purchase, advertising, or feature limits.
Build 31 is prepared as a completely free release and is awaiting App Review.
What it does
01
Vaults
Ask questions across your own documents — PDFs, scans, photos, notes, saved pages. One vault per client or matter, and every answer cites the document it came from. Scanned paper is read on-device.
02
Private meeting notes
Live transcription with a summary, the decisions taken, and action items attributed to the person who owns them. Audio is never written to disk: speech becomes text as it happens and the samples are discarded.
03
Redact
Permanently flattens names, emails, phone numbers, financial account numbers and identification numbers out of PDFs and photos — not a black rectangle you can drag off, the pixels are gone.
04
Your choice of model
Ships with a small bundled model that works out of the box. Download larger open-weights models when you want more, or use Apple's own on-device model. Nothing is downloaded without you asking.
05
Hands-free and everywhere
Voice conversation, on-device text recognition for photos and screenshots, and memory that carries across chats. Your private work remains on the device.
Privacy, in full
AI inference and private-content processing stay on your device. Optional network features send only the information described below when you explicitly request them.
Everything that leaves your device
| What | Who receives it | Where | Why | Trigger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The model file request and network metadata such as your IP address | Hugging Face | United States | Fetching the open-weights model files you explicitly requested | You choose |
| The exact search query you asked to look up and network metadata such as your IP address | DuckDuckGo | United States | Answering with current information and citations | You choose |
| The requested voice-asset file and network metadata such as your IP address | Hugging Face and GitHub | United States | One-time download of text-to-speech assets | You choose |
| The web address you asked the app to read and ordinary request metadata such as your IP address | The website you chose | Wherever that site is hosted | Reading a page you asked the app to read | You choose |
- Web search is switched off by default. Only the exact query you explicitly ask to search is sent to DuckDuckGo; chats, vaults and documents are not attached. DuckDuckGo states that it does not store IP addresses with searches, although de-identified search queries may be retained to improve its service.
- Hugging Face, GitHub and a website you choose may receive and retain ordinary request logs, such as an IP address, timestamp, requested file or URL, device or browser details, under their own policies.
- The app declares background audio so a meeting keeps transcribing when your screen locks. It does not record in the background at any other time.
- Version 1.0 is completely free. There is no subscription, paywall, trial, purchase SDK, or in-app purchase.
Where your content lives
Your chats, vaults, documents, meeting notes and memory are stored only on your device. There is no Cloister account and no server-side copy of that private content. The app contains no purchase or subscription system. Deleting the app deletes its local data.
Analytics
Cloister contains no analytics SDK, and Leap Studio receives no product-analytics events from the app. The optional network providers named above may keep service logs or use de-identified request data for their own service analytics under their privacy policies.
Permissions it asks for
- Microphone
- Meeting transcription and voice conversation. Audio is processed live and never saved.
- Speech recognition
- Turning speech into text on the device.
- Camera
- Photographing a document to add it to a vault.
- Reminders
- Pushing action items from a meeting into your reminders.
- Calendar (write only)
- Creating follow-up events. The app cannot read your calendar.
AI disclosure
Cloister AI generates text with a language model. Output can be wrong and should be checked before you rely on it. Cloister does not send chats, vaults, documents or meeting notes to Leap Studio or a remote model for training. Optional network actions and the limited information they send are disclosed in this policy.
Models
- Apple Foundation Models (on-device)
- Qwen3 1.7B, bundled
- Qwen3 4B, Gemma 3 4B and Llama 3.2 3B, downloadable
Licensing
Bundled open-weights models are Apache 2.0. Licence text is included in the app under Settings, Model licences.