Buy Your AI. Don’t Rent It.

7 minute read

The Subscription Trap

Big Tech already owns your social graph, your search history, your email, your documents, your photos, and your attention.

Now they want to own your thinking.

Every major tech company is racing to make AI a service — a subscription you pay monthly, running on their servers, processing your data through their infrastructure, learning from your interactions, and locking you deeper into their ecosystem.

This isn’t a new product category. It’s the same extraction model wearing a smarter hat.

AI Services vs AI Products

This distinction matters more than almost anything else happening in technology right now.

AI as a Service

You subscribe. You send your prompts, your documents, your questions, your business plans, your private thoughts to someone else’s server. They process it. They send back answers. They keep the data. They improve their model on your input. They charge you monthly. Forever.

Your data leaves your device
Their servers process your thinking
Their terms of service govern your information
Their business model depends on you staying subscribed
They see everything you ask, everything you create, everything you’re worried about

Sound familiar? It’s the same model as Gmail, Google Docs, and iCloud — but now applied to your reasoning and decision-making.

AI as a Product

You buy it. Once. You install it on your device — your phone, your laptop, your home server. It runs locally. Your data never leaves. Nobody else sees your prompts. Nobody else learns from your questions. Nobody charges you next month for the same capability.

Your data stays on your device
Your hardware does the processing
No terms of service govern your private use
No subscription creates ongoing dependency
Nobody sees what you’re thinking

One model extends Big Tech’s reach into the most intimate parts of your cognition. The other puts intelligence in your hands and walks away.

“But Cloud AI Is More Powerful”

Today, yes. The biggest models require massive compute. That’s real.

But consider the trajectory:

Models are getting smaller and more efficient every quarter
On-device AI is already handling tasks that required cloud servers two years ago
Apple, Qualcomm, and others are shipping dedicated AI hardware in consumer devices
Open-source models are closing the gap with proprietary ones
Quantization and distillation make powerful models run on ordinary hardware

The gap between cloud AI and local AI is shrinking fast. And for most of what you actually need — managing your schedule, drafting messages, organizing information, handling routine decisions — local AI is already sufficient.

You don’t need GPT-5 to manage your community service commitments. You need something smart enough, running on your device, that knows your context and works for you.

The Big Tech Pattern

Every generation of technology follows the same playbook:

Phase 1: Give it away. Email was free. Search was free. Social was free. AI assistants are free (or cheap).

Phase 2: Become essential. You can’t function without Gmail. You can’t navigate without Google Maps. You can’t stay connected without the platform. You won’t be able to think without their AI.

Phase 3: Extract. Now that you’re dependent, monetize everything. Your data. Your attention. Your social connections. Your cognitive patterns.

Phase 4: Lock in. Make leaving impossible. Your documents are in their format. Your history is in their system. Your AI knows you — but only on their terms.

AI services are in Phase 1 right now. The prices are low. The capabilities are impressive. The terms are generous.

Give it three years.

What You Actually Own

When you buy an AI product — a model you download, install, and run — you own something real:

The capability. It doesn’t degrade. It doesn’t get nerfed in an update. It doesn’t disappear when a company pivots.
Your data. Every interaction stays on your device. Your prompts, your documents, your patterns — private.
Your independence. No subscription means no leverage. The vendor can’t change terms, raise prices, or cut you off.
Your context. A local AI that learns your preferences, your community, your patterns — without reporting any of it to a server.

This isn’t theoretical. Local AI models exist today. They’re not as flashy as the cloud offerings, but they’re yours.

KERI Makes This Work for Real Life

Here’s the problem with self-sovereign anything: management overhead.

Running your own identity, managing your own keys, handling your own credentials, coordinating with your community — it’s a lot of work. More than most people want to do manually. This is the honest reason centralized platforms win: they handle the complexity for you. At the cost of your sovereignty, but still — they handle it.

This is exactly where owned AI changes the equation.

Your AI Agent, Running Locally

A KERI agent is already a defined concept: a software agent with a delegated AID that can act on your behalf within cryptographically defined scopes. It can sign things for you, accept credentials, respond to requests, manage your interactions.

Now give that agent local intelligence.

Not cloud intelligence that reports to a tech company. Local intelligence that runs on your device, understands your context, and operates within the authority you’ve delegated — cryptographically scoped and revocable.

What This Looks Like Day to Day

Managing credentials: Your AI agent tracks which credentials you hold, which are expiring, and which you need to renew. It handles the OADA flow — reviewing offers, recommending accepts, preparing disclosures — so you don’t have to manually manage every interaction.

Community participation: Someone in your neighborhood posts a request for help moving. Your agent sees it, checks your calendar, knows you’re free Saturday, and drafts a response for your approval. All within your local community’s KERI-based network. No platform involved.

Reputation management: Your agent tracks your community interactions, helps you understand your reputation in different contexts, and advises on which credentials to disclose in different situations. All locally. All private.

Key management: The most tedious part of self-sovereign identity — key rotation, witness management, backup verification — handled by your agent automatically, within the security parameters you’ve set.

Selective disclosure: A service asks for your credentials. Your agent reviews the request, determines the minimum disclosure needed, and presents it for your approval. “They need proof you’re over 18, not your birthdate. I’ll share the age credential only.”

The Management Layer KERI Needs

This is the honest truth: KERI is powerful but complex. The protocol handles key management, delegation, witnessing, credential issuance, and revocation with mathematical precision. But mathematical precision isn’t user-friendly.

Owned AI is the management layer that makes KERI accessible to everyone.

Not a cloud service that manages KERI for you (that’s just a new gatekeeper). A product you own that manages KERI with you. On your device. Under your control. With your authority.

The AI handles the complexity. KERI handles the security. You handle the decisions.

The Recipe

The pieces fit together:

Layer	What	Who Controls It
Identity	KERI identifiers, key management, witnesses	You
Credentials	ACDCs — verifiable, selective, revocable	You
Intelligence	Local AI product — your agent, your device	You
Community	KERI-native networks — neighbors, cooperatives, organizations	Your community
Economy	Direct exchange, credit clearing, reputation	The participants

No Big Tech layer. No subscription to a company that sees everything. No platform that becomes the new gatekeeper.

Every component is owned, not rented. Every interaction is private, not surveilled. Every relationship is direct, not intermediated.

The Counter-Argument, Honestly

“Local AI won’t be as good as cloud AI.”

For frontier capabilities — the most advanced reasoning, the largest context windows, the newest breakthroughs — this is probably true for a while. Maybe always.

But “as good as the frontier” isn’t the bar. The bar is “good enough for your actual life.” Good enough to manage your KERI credentials. Good enough to help coordinate community service. Good enough to handle the tedious parts of self-sovereignty so you can focus on the human parts.

That bar is already within reach. And it gets lower every month as hardware improves and models get more efficient.

The question isn’t whether local AI will match GPT-whatever. The question is whether you’re willing to hand your cognitive autonomy to Big Tech while you wait to find out.

A Future Without Big Tech

Not a future against Big Tech. Big Tech can keep building its services for people who want them.

But a future where Big Tech is optional.

Where you can participate in your community, manage your identity, handle your finances, coordinate with your neighbors, and make decisions — all with AI that belongs to you, running on infrastructure you control, secured by cryptography that doesn’t require anyone’s permission.

KERI provides the trust infrastructure. Owned AI provides the usability layer. Together, they make self-sovereignty practical — not just for cryptographers and enthusiasts, but for your parents, your neighbors, your local business owner.

That’s the recipe. Identity you own. Intelligence you own. Community you build. Big Tech not required.

TODO: Add specific examples of local AI models suitable for KERI agent integration, technical architecture for KERI agent + local LLM, comparison of total cost of ownership (AI product vs lifetime AI service subscription), and real-world community scenarios showing the management overhead reduction