Client-Side Files Over Cloud Services: A Better Architecture for AI Memory

Today's AI agents waste significant resources—studies show 21.8% of input tokens go toward re-establishing context each session because nothing persists between interactions. While the industry has built cloud-based memory solutions, they shift the privacy risk to a new attack surface. This proposal offers an alternative: memory as user-owned encrypted files that persist locally, enabling both efficiency and genuine data control without requiring any centralized service.