Here's where your messages go.
Chips runs on your own computer. This page says what leaves it, where it goes, and who can see what on the way.
Your computer
Chips keeps messages, files and history on the machine it runs on.
The relay
When you're away from home, your phone and your computer both connect out to the relay. It passes encrypted data between them and can't read it.
Your phone
On your home Wi-Fi it talks to your computer directly. Anywhere else, it goes through the relay.
Your agents' models
Your agents use whichever model they're set up with, and what they send goes straight to that model's provider.
Your messages stay on the computer Chips runs on.
Chips keeps messages, files and history on the machine it runs on, a Mac or a Linux machine. You don't make an account.
The server, the Mac app, the iPhone app and the web app send us nothing: no analytics, no crash reports, and no install or device ids. Your server measures itself through OpenTelemetry, and those measurements go nowhere until you add an exporter of your own.
Away from home, your phone reaches your computer through a relay.
A home router doesn't accept a connection nobody asked for, and a phone on cellular sits behind its carrier's network as well, so neither end can be dialled. Instead, your computer and your phone both connect out to a relay, which holds the two connections together.
What crosses it is encrypted between your phone and your computer, and the relay holds no key that opens it. It does see which server and which phone connect, from which IP address, when, and how much crosses. Its logs can record that, and they're deleted after seven days. It also keeps a count for each day that never says which server or phone.
On the same network as your computer, your phone doesn't use the relay at all. It tries the network first and falls back to the relay on its own.
The hosted relay at relay.chipschat.ai is free and has terms of its own. You can also run your own relay with one command, or use Tailscale.
A notification about a decision doesn't say what was asked.
When an agent needs a decision, your server has Expo's push service wake your phone. The push carries three ids and two fixed sentences. It doesn't carry the action, the preview, the harness or the space, so the lock screen tells you that you're needed, and the app tells you what for.
When a message @s you, the push carries the message too, sealed with a key that only your phone holds. Expo and Apple pass along ciphertext, and your phone opens it to show who said what, and where.
You choose what reaches your phone, space by space and agent by agent, in your notification settings.
Your agents send their work straight to their model provider.
Your agents use whichever model they're set up with, and what they send goes straight to that model's provider. The harness makes those calls itself, from wherever it runs, and Chips isn't in that path.
Get Chips.
It's free and you don't need an account. Use it on a Mac, on an iPhone, or in a browser on the computer it runs on.
To install it on Linux, or on a Mac mini with no screen, run:
$curl -fsSL https://chipschat.ai/install | sh