Our chats delete themselves. Here's what stays.
Why an assistant you can be honest with starts with deletion.
Every conversation with Ask Safely deletes itself on a timer you choose: 8 hours by default, or 7- or 30-day windows. Not archived. Not "deprioritized." Gone. People ask why we'd build that on purpose, since the rest of the industry treats your chat history as an asset to mine. Here's the logic.
Most of what you say to an AI is scaffolding. The question about the rash. The vent about a coworker. The budget math at midnight. It helped in the moment, and it doesn't need to follow you around. When every word is kept forever, you start editing yourself, and an assistant you can't be honest with isn't much of an assistant.
But some of it is worth keeping. Your kids' ages. The vegetarian rule at dinner. The 10K you're training for and the week you're on. That isn't chat history. That's knowledge.
So we split the two. Chats clear on their own. Knowledge goes in a Knowledgebook.
A Knowledgebook is a living document of what you know, written in plain words you can read and edit. It fills as you chat: when something seems worth keeping, Ask Safely proposes it, and nothing lands without your yes. There's no black box. Open the book and every fact your AI knows about you is on the page, with a note about where it came from. Change a line. Delete a line. It's your handwriting, in effect, even when we hold the pen.
Here's what that feels like. Ask "what should we do this weekend with the kids?" and the answer already knows they're 9 and 12, that lunch has to work for a vegetarian, that afternoons go better close to home. Under the answer sits a receipt showing which Knowledgebook each fact came from. Tap it and you're reading the source. That's the difference between an AI that remembers you and an AI you've briefed.
For a Saturday: the Works Museum in the morning, whose hands-on engineering lab is a hit with kids who are 9 and 12. Then an easy vegetarian lunch nearby, a short walk from downtown, so nobody melts down by mid-afternoon.
And because a Knowledgebook is a document rather than a database entry, it can go where you go. Later this year, yours will be able to travel. Choose what another assistant can read: your People and Lifestyle, say. It answers like it knows you too. You see every recall and its source, and you can stop sharing any time. Your other Knowledgebooks stay home.
The chat clears. The Knowledgebook doesn't.
Bring what you know. Keep it yours.