Questions, answered.

A USB drive holding an expert reference library and an AI that reads it, both running on your own Mac or Windows computer. Ask a question in plain words and get a straight answer with the source named, so you can go and read it yourself. No internet, no account and no subscription — not as a fallback, but as how it works every time.

Yes. Normal operation needs no connection at all. The models, the indexes and the reference corpus are on the drive; the work happens on your computer. Connecting is only useful for updates and expansion content.

Five parts of one product. Intel answers questions from the reference library and names its sources. Library lets you open and search those source documents yourself, and add your own. Scout looks at a photo and describes what it sees, then searches the library for what to do about it. Companion is an ordinary chat model for thinking out loud. Maps is offline maps and navigation, and Intel can query it.

People whose work or preparation assumes the connection might not be there: homesteaders, remote and rural households, emergency planners, backcountry travellers, and anyone who wants a reference library that cannot be taken away, throttled or logged.

Yes. Maps renders from data on the drive rather than fetching tiles from a server, so it does not depend on Wi-Fi, cellular service or a cloud mapping API. With networking fully disabled you can still open maps, search, and navigate them.

Street maps, terrain, topographic contours and mapped trails. Search for places and geographic features. Drop waypoints and read coordinates. Measure distance and take a bearing between points. Check elevation. Work out a route. Inspect nearby mapped infrastructure and points of interest.

Installable regional datasets. The drive ships with a base map; packs add street-level detail, topography, terrain, contours, trails and offline routing for the regions you actually move through. A larger drive carries more of the world at depth rather than all of it thinly.

Yes, and it is the part worth understanding. Ask for the nearest mapped water source and Maps supplies the location, distance and bearing from the map data, then Intel explains how to treat water from that kind of source, cited to the manual it came from. The geographic fact comes from the map rather than from the model guessing at coordinates.

Intel is retrieval-first: it answers from the reference library and names the source, so every answer can be checked against the document it came from. That is the mechanism, and it is why the sources are shown rather than summarised away. It is not a guarantee that software is never wrong.

It says so. When the evidence is not in the library, Intel is designed to decline rather than fill the gap with something plausible. A reference tool that refuses is more useful than one that always produces an answer, because you can tell the two apart.

No system can honestly claim that, and we do not. What we can describe is the mechanism: answers are generated from retrieved passages, sources are cited, and the system is built to refuse when retrieval comes back thin. Judge it on those behaviours rather than on an absolute promise.

No, and it is built not to. Scout will describe what it sees and decline the edibility judgement, because a photograph is not enough to make that call and a wrong answer there is the kind that hurts someone. Never treat image recognition as proof that anything is safe to eat.

No. It is reference and decision support. It does not replace emergency services, licensed medical care, a qualified tradesperson, or the law that applies where you are.

Yes. Add your own PDFs and the library indexes them alongside the shipped references, so it answers about your generator and your well pump rather than equipment in general. Your documents stay on your machine.

Indexing needs selectable text. A scan or a photograph of a page is an image to the software, so there is nothing to index. If a PDF lets you select and copy text, it will work.

A Mac or a Windows computer with a free USB port. 16 GB of memory is the comfortable minimum. A dedicated graphics card makes answers arrive faster but is not required.

The drive carries the library, the models and the indexes, but your computer does the thinking — so speed depends on your machine rather than on the drive, and more memory unlocks the larger model tiers.

It varies by device, and every option can reach a USB-C computer.

Expedition 128GB and Carry 128GB / 256GB are USB Type-A drives, and ship with a Type-A to Type-C adapter so they plug into machines that only have USB-C.

Basecamp 512GB carries both a Type-A and a Type-C connector on the drive itself, so it needs no adapter either way.

Basecamp 1TB is a Type-C drive and ships with both a Type-C to Type-A cable and a Type-A to Type-C adapter, so it also covers both.

No, and it matters for setting expectations. The drive is the library; your computer is the librarian. Nothing about drive speed determines how fast an answer arrives.

Nothing is installed, and nothing is written to your internal drive. The application runs from the USB itself.

What does happen is that the AI model is read into your computer's memory when it starts, because a model has to be in RAM to run at all — that is true of every local AI, and it is why your available memory sets which model tier you can use. Memory is volatile. Close it, unplug the drive, and nothing of it is left behind.

Telemetry is disabled by default, and when you are offline there is no network path for a prompt to reach a cloud service at all. That is a structural property of running locally rather than a promise about how we handle your data.

It lives in Manage → Privacy & Telemetry, it is off by default, and you can turn it on or back off whenever you like. It fails closed: if the preferences file is missing or unreadable, it stays off.

With it off, nothing is sent. With it on and the machine online, it sends the questions asked, thumbs ratings, and any comment you add — which is how weak answers get found and the corpus gets better.

One behaviour worth knowing: rating an answer thumbs-down while telemetry is off will ask whether you want to share that particular feedback, because a report of a bad answer is the last thing that should be silently discarded. A thumbs-up while off is simply not sent, with no prompt and no interruption.

Not automatically. Air-gapping is a property of the computer you run it on, not of the drive. Off-Grid AI operates fully offline, and if you also run it on a machine that is genuinely disconnected, that machine is air-gapped. Inserting the drive does not create an air gap by itself.

The content is encrypted and its integrity is validated, so tampering and corruption are detectable. It is licensed to work as a product, not as a folder you can duplicate.

The Core drive carries Intel, Library, Scout, Companion and Maps, plus the reference corpus spanning 18 knowledge domains — water, food production, shelter, navigation, communications, medical, energy, firecraft, sanitation, mobility, security, tools, logistics, wild food, infrastructure, group resilience, decision support and mindset.

No. The six Expansion Packs — Field Medic, Veterinary, Master Electrician, Master Mechanic, Tactical Operations and Advanced Agriculture — are sold separately and require the Core drive.

No. It is bought once. There is no account to maintain and no recurring fee, and it does not stop working if you never connect it again.

When you next have a connection, updates to the corpus, the software and any expansion content can be pulled down. Nothing about staying current is required for the product to keep working offline.