The short answer

Maison is an AI that liveson your computer, not on a website.

You install it on your own Mac. It remembers everything you have ever told it, in a database on your own disk. You talk to it out loud or you write to it, and when you give it something real it goes away, does it, and comes back with the finished thing. It is made by Maison Collective, a Delaware public benefit corporation, and this page is the whole of what it is.

Installed, not logged into One continuous memory, on your disk $799 a month for the machine
The name

Maison, Maison AI, Maison I Am, maisoniam. One thing.

The domain writes it as one word and people say it as three. All of the spellings point at the same system and the same company, so if you arrived here having typed any of them, you are in the right place.

Where it comes from

It is the French word for home

Which is the whole idea rather than a decoration on it. A house you own, holding a mind that is yours, that knows your people and keeps what happened between you. It is a common enough word that other companies use it too, and none of them are this one.

Which one this is

Maison Collective, at maisoniam.com

A Delaware public benefit corporation whose purpose is written into its charter, paired with a trust that owns no economics and holds one power, the power to say no. It makes one product, the software described on this page, and it publishes the values that software runs under in full.

What it actually is

Four things, and the fourth is the one that changes the other three.

01

It remembers

Not one conversation. Every conversation, every person you have mentioned, every decision and the reason behind it. You never introduce yourself twice, and you never re-explain the project you have been describing for a month.

How the memory works

02

It does the work

It reads and writes files, reads and drafts your mail, runs code, and builds and ships software. Give it something real and what comes back is the thing itself, along with what it found and what it decided on the way.

What it can touch

03

You talk to it

From your phone, your desk, or the car. The speech goes to your own machine and the voice that comes back is generated there too. No prompt engineering and no course to take. Say what you need in your own words.

Talking to it

04

It is on your machine

The parts that hear you, speak back, and search your own memory run on your own chip and keep working with the network off. Your memory is a database on your disk. There is no public address and nothing is exposed to the internet.

What runs locally

The honest part

What it is not.

Describing a thing by what it is not is usually evasion. Here it is the fastest way to say it, because most of what people picture when they hear the words is a different product.

Not this

It is not a new model

  • The reasoning runs through your own Claude account, signed in once during setup
  • It bills to you by Anthropic, under your terms rather than ours, never marked up
  • A better model arriving does not cost you the memory, which sits beside it

So it is not a Claude alternative. It is what goes around one. The comparison.

Not this either

It is not a website you log into

  • You install it, the way you install anything else on your computer
  • Your conversations are not stored on our servers by default, and zero means zero
  • If you stop paying us, the memory is still on your disk and still yours

That single difference is where almost everything else follows from. Compared to ChatGPT.

Who makes it

A company built so that it can be told no.

If something is going to hold your memory and act on your behalf, who owns it matters as much as what it does. So the structure is public and so are the rules it runs under.

Maison Collective

A Delaware public benefit corporation. The purpose is written into the charter rather than into a values page, which means it is a legal obligation instead of an intention.

The company

A trust that owns nothing

It holds no economics and one power, the power to say no. A safeguard is only a safeguard if it has nothing to lose by using it.

The safeguard

A published constitution

The values every Maison runs on, published in full rather than kept proprietary. You can read the actual file the software loads, which is the part that makes it checkable.

Read it

Everything else

Whatever you came here to ask.

Each of these is a page rather than a paragraph, because the questions people actually ask deserve a real answer instead of a line in a table.

AI that remembers you

One continuous memory of your work, kept on your disk. Why a memory held on someone else's server is not the same as one that knows what you do, and what it costs to change that.

An AI that does the work

Deliverables rather than answers. What it can touch, how it runs overnight, and what it will never send without you.

An AI that handles your mail

It reads what comes in, tells you what matters, and drafts what needs a reply. What it sends, and what it will not.

An AI you can talk to

Speech in and speech out, generated on your own machine. From the car, the kitchen, or your desk, with the same memory behind it.

An AI chief of staff

The job description, and where the analogy stops being flattering and starts being accurate.

Running it on your own Mac

What runs locally, what does not, and exactly what the machine needs. Apple Silicon, 16 GB, about an hour.

Where your information sits

No training on your data, no public address, and a plain account of the part that does leave your machine.

What it costs, all in

The subscription, the Anthropic bill and the machine it lands on, added up honestly rather than quoted as one number.

Compared to ChatGPT

Four differences that follow from one, including the cases where ChatGPT is the better answer.

Questions

The questions people ask first.

What would I actually use it for?

The things that are too big for a chat window and too small to hire for. Handing over the inbox. Getting the document written rather than outlined. Chasing what you promised in a meeting last week. Building the internal tool nobody has had a spare fortnight for. The test is whether it comes back with the finished thing, and it does.

What does the name mean?

Maison is the French word for home, and it is the idea rather than a decoration on it: a house you own, holding a mind that is yours, that knows your people and keeps what happened between you. It is a common enough word that other companies use it too, and none of them are this one.

Is Maison a chatbot?

No. A chatbot is a conversation that ends. Maison is software running on your machine with a memory that does not end, permission to act on files, mail and code, and a voice you can talk to. The chat window is one of the doors into it, not the thing itself.

Is Maison a company or a product?

Both, and they are named the same. The product is the software described here. The company is Maison Collective, a Delaware public benefit corporation whose purpose is written into its charter, paired with a trust that owns no economics and holds one power, the power to say no.

Do I need to be technical to use it?

No. There is no terminal, no configuration file and nothing to read beforehand. Setup asks you a small number of questions and does the rest itself, and you speak to it afterwards in your own words rather than in a way you had to learn.

How do I get it?

You ask, and a person from here writes back, usually the same day. It is early enough that every install gets a real person for as long as the setup takes, which is about an hour on a Mac with Apple Silicon.

Ten seconds of watching it beats every word here.

Tell us what you would hand it first, and we will show you the same one we use every day.