Today we published a press release. It announces Project Heliosphere, an early-stage research and development initiative exploring a new model for personal digital identity, data ownership, artificial intelligence, and decentralized online interaction. The formal version is in the news section. This is the version where we explain why.
The pattern we kept repeating
We have been building on the Internet for over thirty years — websites, publishing platforms, social networks, cloud services, and now AI systems and agents. Look back across all of it and one pattern is hard to miss. Almost every generation of technology required the human to move into somebody else's system.
A new social network meant rebuilding your relationships from scratch. A new publishing platform meant re-establishing who you are and what you care about. A new AI assistant means teaching it, again, your preferences, your projects, your history, your context — and then leaving all of that behind the moment you try a different one.
The individual is the only thing present in every one of those systems, and the individual is the one thing none of them let you carry out the door.
Why AI makes this urgent
Artificial intelligence raises the stakes on that old pattern in a way that social networks never did. An AI platform that holds your accumulated context — every conversation, every preference, every document you have shared — becomes the permanent custodian of the most useful digital version of you. Switching providers stops being an inconvenience and starts being a loss.
We do not think that is how the relationship should be defined. The person should be the permanent part. Applications and AI models should be interchangeable tools that operate with permission from the human — not the other way around.
What "Heliosphere" means
The code name is deliberate. Helio for a central sun: the human at the center, with services, applications, communities, and AI systems orbiting that person rather than enclosing them. We chose it because we wanted this to read as what it is — a serious research program — and not as yet another social app. The eventual product may carry a different commercial name. The code name stays.
The thing the sun holds together is what we are calling a portable Human Biosphere: a persistent digital environment the person owns, containing whatever they choose to keep in it. Identity and credentials. Personal and professional relationships. Communities and areas of interest. Feeds and information sources they control. Personal knowledge and digital history. AI agents they have authorized. And, critically, granular permissions that decide who and what gets access to which parts — and for how long.
The part most people will care about: AI permissions
Here is the practical shape of it. A research task might go to one AI system. Software development to another. Image generation to a third. Sensitive local processing to a privately operated model running on hardware you control. All of that while your underlying identity and context remain yours, and each system only sees the slice you granted it.
That is the opposite of the current arrangement, where the price of a capable assistant is handing one company the whole of you. We want the individual to selectively grant AI systems access to their context, and to revoke it, without the model provider becoming the owner of that context.
Overlapping circles, one person
The second idea is overlapping digital biospheres. You participate in a family, a profession, a town, a school, a business, a publication, a handful of communities. Today each of those organizations maintains its own, completely separate digital version of you. Under the Heliosphere concept, regional publishers, businesses, social platforms, AI assistants, and future applications become participants in your environment rather than owners of it. Public, community, professional, family, and private spaces can coexist without a separate identity for each.
What we are actually building first
We intend to evaluate existing open protocols rather than recreate technology that already exists. The earliest experiments will be based on the AT Protocol, the decentralized networking layer underlying Bluesky, which already handles portable identity, social relationships, portable data, and interoperable applications well. Private and sensitive information will likely need separate storage and security architectures, and we will examine complementary technologies for that.
The first prototypes focus on six things: human-controlled identity, digital circles and spaces, personal knowledge and context, AI permissions, AI model independence, and open interoperability schemas so independent applications can interact with portions of a Human Biosphere with explicit authorization.
What we are not claiming
We are careful about this on every page of this site, and this project is no exception. Project Heliosphere is an experimental research and development initiative. It is not a finished commercial platform, and we are not going to describe it as one until it is. Development and architectural research begin now. Technical documentation, prototype information, and opportunities for developers and technology partners to participate will be announced as the work develops.
The long-term question is bigger than another social network. It is whether a new digital layer can exist in which social networks, publishers, businesses, communities, applications, and AI systems interact around the individual rather than enclosing the individual inside proprietary platforms.
Thirty years of asking people to move into our systems. Now we want to find out what happens when the system moves around the human.