If you want to use an AI assistant without sending texts and documents to a cloud service, Anything LLM is one possible solution. According to t3n, the free tool combines a chatbot, a web search and a built-in knowledge store. Agentic capabilities come on top of that. The magazine describes the application as an all-rounder for local AI use.

What the individual components mean

The chatbot is the familiar interface: you ask questions or enter tasks and receive answers from a language model. With a local solution, this model runs on your own computer or in your own network rather than with an external provider.

The web search is meant to ease a well-known problem. Language models only know what they learned during training. With a search function, an assistant can also draw on up-to-date information from the web.

The knowledge store is there to make your own documents usable. The principle: when you ask a question, the assistant falls back on stored material and can use it as a guide for its answer. This makes it possible, for example, to search internal material without handing it over to anyone.

Agentic capabilities generally mean that a system doesn't just answer, but breaks tasks down into steps and uses tools such as web search to carry them out.

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Who this may be interesting for

Mainly for readers who care about data protection, for example with confidential notes, contracts or company documents. Anyone who would rather have several functions in one application than in separate programs can also benefit from an all-in-one package like this.

There are still a few points worth checking. Local models need computing power, and how well they answer depends on the chosen model and on the hardware. In addition, a web search inevitably has to send requests to the outside. Anyone who wants to work strictly offline should therefore look closely at which functions they enable.

How Anything LLM performs in a test and how the setup works can be found in the original t3n article.