About Osaurus

Osaurus is an open source, MIT licensed harness for personal AI. It runs natively on your Mac, works with any model, and keeps your data, memory, and agents under your control.

How it started

Osaurus began with a dinosaur.

Before Osaurus, we built Dinoki, a pixel art AI companion that lived on your Mac desktop. It started as a personal project, a fun experiment in what happens when AI feels like a character you live with instead of a chat window you visit. People loved it.

Then we launched Dinoki Premium and noticed something broken. Users were paying twice: once for the app, and again for the AI inference behind it. Developers who wanted to build delightful AI products had to become billing companies and infrastructure companies first. The model providers captured the value; everyone else absorbed the friction.

The deeper we dug, the more fragmentation we found. Fragmented providers. Fragmented tooling. Fragmented monetization. Meanwhile, Apple Silicon had quietly become powerful enough to run capable models locally, and almost no software took real advantage of it.

So we built the missing layer: a native, open source harness where models are interchangeable and everything that actually matters, your context, your memory, your tools, your agents, belongs to you. That layer is Osaurus. Dinoki lives on inside it, as the first of the personal companions the platform makes possible.

What we believe

Inference is a commodity. Your context is not. Models improve every month and swap in and out. What compounds is everything around the model: the memory of your work, the tools your agents can use, the skills they learn, the identity they carry. That layer should not live on someone else's server. It should be yours.

Private by default. When you run open models locally through Osaurus, your conversations, files, and code stay on your Mac. No account required, no telemetry unless you opt in. When a task needs a frontier cloud model, you can add one, and you decide exactly what leaves your machine.

Local first does not mean local only. Osaurus connects to local runtimes like MLX, Ollama, and LM Studio, and to cloud providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Venice AI. One shared memory across all of them. The point is not avoiding the cloud. The point is that you choose.

Free and open, forever.Osaurus is MIT licensed and built in public. Read the source, fork it, ship with it. Software this close to your files and your identity has to be inspectable. “Just trust us” is not an acceptable security model.

Native, not compromised. Osaurus is written in Swift for Apple Silicon, with a custom MLX runtime we maintain in the open. No Electron shell, no cross platform tax. Your computer deserves software built for it.

What is a harness, anyway?

A model on its own is just a very smart text predictor. A harness is everything that turns a model into something useful: the memory that persists between sessions, the tools it can call, the files it can read, the sandbox it runs code in, the identity it carries, the schedule it works on. The harness is the difference between chatting with an AI and having one that works for you.

Agents are what the harness makes possible. An agent is an AI that can pursue a task on its own: watch a folder and organize what lands in it, run a research job while you sleep, transcribe and summarize your meetings, execute code in an isolated sandbox, or check in on a schedule you set. In Osaurus, agents run in the background on your machine, with your models, under your rules.

This is why we say inference is all you need. Bring any model, local or cloud. The harness, and everything it accumulates about how you work, is what compounds. And it is yours.

Who Osaurus is for

Osaurus is for people who want AI that works for them without handing over their life to do it.

Today that includes developers automating their workflows, writers and researchers who want private assistants with real memory, tinkerers running open models on their own hardware, and privacy conscious professionals who cannot send client data to third party servers. You do not need to be an engineer. If you can drag a folder into a window, you can put an agent to work.

Where we are going

We think the personal computer made a promise it has not kept yet: a machine that is genuinely yours, that knows your work, and acts on your behalf. AI finally makes that possible, but only if it is built the right way, on your device, under your control, with an identity you own.

Our roadmap moves in that direction. Companions bring Dinoki and future characters into Osaurus as personal AI you shape over time. Every agent already carries its own cryptographic identity and can communicate over end to end encrypted channels. The destination is a world where your agents do not just work for you, they can work with other agents, transact, and participate in an economy on your behalf, all from hardware you own.

That is what we mean by a true personal computer. Not a terminal into someone else's AI. Yours.

The company

Osaurus, Inc. is a Delaware corporation based in California, backed by Alliance. Our work has been covered by TechCrunch and other press.

We build in public. Follow the work on GitHub, join the community on Discord, or get in touch.