The best way to use AI for writing — without uploading your life
Every mainstream AI writing tool has the same catch: to use it, you upload your document. Your résumé, your board letter, your company’s financials — all of it goes to someone else’s servers, where it may be logged, retained, or used to train the next model.
For a lot of writing, that’s a dealbreaker.
Local-first AI changes the trade-off
A local-first AI tool runs the model on your computer. The document never leaves the device, because the “AI” isn’t in a distant data center — it’s a process on your Mac. No upload, no retention, no exposure.
Modern open models (like DeepSeek and GLM) are good enough to draft and edit real documents, and a capable Mac can run them comfortably. That’s the shift that makes private AI writing practical in 2026.
Two things you actually want
- Drafting — turn your raw materials into a polished first draft you can review at a glance.
- Editing in place — take a document you already have and improve it, keeping or dropping each change, without mangling the original.
edgar does both, and can run entirely on your Mac. When you want frontier power, you can opt into edgar Cloud for models like Claude and GPT — with a clear indicator every time data leaves your device.
The rule of thumb
Keep sensitive work local. Reach for the cloud only when the task genuinely needs it — and only when the tool is honest about it.