Sanctuary Cell Division
A local language model, grounded in your own archive, shaped by your own mission and values, on hardware you control. Nothing leaves the machine. No API key, no account, no vendor. Approved peer organizations can share knowledge bases with each other later, and every document carries the record of where it came from, from the moment it is ingested.
Why it exists
Organizations that hold hard-won knowledge: collectives, mutual aid groups, community land trusts, clinics, unions: mostly can’t use the tools that would help them read their own archives. Those tools want the archive uploaded to someone else’s computer, and want a subscription, and change their terms.
Sanctuary is the other arrangement: the model runs on your hardware, the archive stays on your disk, the agent speaks in your voice because you wrote its mission file, and sharing happens between organizations that have verified each other directly.
Where it has been shown
A panel at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), 2026, and presented at Ars Electronica 2026 in Linz. The two rooms want different halves of the same argument: HOPE cares whether the thing actually runs on hardware you control, and Ars Electronica cares what it means that an organization can now hold its own model. The project has to answer both to be worth anything.
How it is set up
Requires Docker. Nothing else is installed on the machine.
make init, guided: it asks your organization’s name, which of four situations describes you, and a passphrase for your organization’s keymake pull-model: downloads the language model (~2GB)make up, thenmake ingest: start, and read your archive into the knowledge base
make init prints a recovery sheet. Print it and store it somewhere the machine
is not: it is what restores your identity if the machine is lost, and without it a lost machine
means every peer has to pair with you again by phone.
The passphrase is needed to add documents, create invites, and share bundles. Answering questions does not need it, so an instance can serve a whole organization while the key stays locked.
What it refuses to fake
With an empty archive it still answers: clearly marked “Not from your archive”, in amber,
with no citations. Seeded material is attributed as such: a citation reads
sanctuary-handbook@0.2, added by …, never as though your organization wrote it.
Three optional seeds exist, none of which run on their own: the project’s own docs, so it can explain itself and its own refusal lists; a set of fictional documents that contradict each other on purpose; and public sources for a given sector.
v0.1 · single organization (current)
v0.2 · voice
v0.3 · federation between verified peers