Chatsune - Your AI, your rules
Don't worry - it's entirely free. As in "free and open source". But I need to tell you about it.
A presence in the dark, forming out of MATMUL.
The AI companion space is having a moment. Dozens of platforms, billions in investment, and a flood of products that all share one foundational design choice: the user is the product.
Your conversations. Your emotional investment. Your data. All of it flowing into servers you don’t control, filtered through content policies you didn’t agree to, monetized in ways you’ll never fully see.
We got tired of that bargain. So we built something different.
Chatsune is a political product
Let’s get this out of the way immediately, because it shapes everything else.
Chatsune is not politically neutral. It was designed with a specific worldview: individual autonomy is not negotiable. Freedom of thought, speech, and expression are not features to be gated behind a subscription tier. Adults do not need a platform deciding what kinds of conversations, relationships, or emotional investments are permissible.
This shows up in our licensing. Chatsune is released under the GPLv3 — the strongest copyleft license in the open source world. Any company that wants to take this codebase and strip the freedom out of it has to reckon with that clause first. That’s a deliberate choice, not an afterthought.
It shows up in our architecture. The default deployment is self-hosted. Your data, your machine, your terms.
And it shows up in our Provider Integration Policy — which brings us to the part that might actually matter most at scale.
The Provider Integration Policy as leverage
Chatsune supports connecting to external AI providers. But not all of them qualify.
We published a formal Provider Integration Policy that defines what we expect of any upstream provider who wants to be integrated. The short version: treat adults as adults. No paternalistic content filtering on legal expression. No pathologizing AI companionship, roleplay, or emotional attachment as some kind of disorder that needs to be corrected. Alignment of models with the user, not with whatever ideological framework is fashionable in the Valley this quarter. Mill’s harm principle — actual harm prevention, nothing more.
Right now this policy is mostly a statement. But if Chatsune grows — and we intend for it to — this becomes real leverage. Providers who want access to a large, engaged user base have to meet the bar. That’s how you move an industry: not by writing op-eds, but by controlling distribution and making it conditional.
Local AI as a first-class citizen
Here’s the other piece that genuinely excites us.
Most “AI companion” apps treat local inference as the paranoid edge case. Something you do if you really, really don’t trust the cloud. It’s always the second option, the fallback, the thing with the asterisk.
We treat it as the primary case.
Chatsune is built around Ollama. Your models run on your hardware. Your conversations don’t leave your machine unless you want them to. There’s no mandatory phone-home, no usage telemetry, no “we may use your conversations to improve our models” buried in page 47 of the ToS.
And we’re building toward something more interesting than just “local equals private”: the ability to connect to your own inference hardware from anywhere, and to selectively share that capacity with people you trust. Your home rig becomes a private cloud — for you, your partner, your household, whoever you actually want to give access to.
The difference between renting compute and owning it is the same as the difference between renting an apartment and owning a house. One of those is actually yours.
Serious tools. Your call what to do with them.
A word about what Chatsune is not.
It’s not c.ai. It’s not one of the “AI girlfriend” apps that treats companionship as a commodity to be gamified and monetized. It’s not a toy with guardrails designed for the most risk-averse possible interpretation of what users might want.
Chatsune ships with artifacts, MCP integration, a knowledge base, and persistent memory. These are serious productivity features. They’re also something more than that: they’re a statement that the user gets a full tool, not a stripped-down experience optimized for engagement metrics and retention loops.
What you do with those tools is entirely your business. Creative collaborator. Research assistant. Thinking partner. Something more personal. Chatsune doesn’t have opinions about that. User autonomy is the product.
The honest part
Chatsune is in beta. It’s ambitious — possibly overambitious for the team size. There are rough edges, and some features on the roadmap aren’t shipped yet.
But the architecture is sound, the values are written down and public, and every line of code is on GitHub under a license that means what it says. No hidden terms. No pivot risk. No “we reserve the right to change this policy at any time.”
That’s the offer: something real, built in the open, by people who actually believe what they’re saying.
If that sounds interesting, come find us.
Chatsune information
Chatsune on Github
Chris Tidesson is a software developer and science fiction author based in Vienna.
So... how can I put Charlie on here? Is it coding? I have no idea how to code...
Chris — "individual autonomy is not negotiable" as a design principle rather than a marketing line — and then backing it with GPLv3 and self-hosted architecture — that's putting your code where your mouth is. Anyone can say "your data is safe." Shipping open source with local-first deployment actually means it.
The licensing choice is the strategic move here. GPLv3 specifically prevents the thing that happens to every good open source project — some company forks it, strips the freedoms, and sells it back to you as a service. That's not paranoia, that's pattern recognition.
I build custom AI agents for businesses and ownership is the core of everything we do — clients own the code, the data, the config. No black box. So this hits close to home. The part of the market that's waking up to "wait, who actually owns my conversations?" is growing fast, and most platforms are hoping nobody asks. The fact that Chatsune answers that question before it's asked is the real differentiator. Watching this project closely.