Underdog Wants to Sell You an AI Assistant That Never Calls Home

Published: October 7, 2026 · Last updated: October 7, 2026

TL;DR: A new AI lab called Conway Research just launched Underdog, an assistant built to run entirely on your own Mac, iPhone, or Windows PC instead of a company’s cloud servers. It skips both subscriptions and ads in favor of charging a small fee only when it actually completes a purchase for you.

Every major AI assistant right now works roughly the same way. You type or talk, your words travel to a data center somewhere, a massive cloud model processes them, and an answer comes back. Underdog, launched today by a startup called Conway Research, is betting a meaningful number of people are tired of that arrangement.

The assistant comes from Sigil Wen, who founded Conway Research earlier this year, and its entire pitch rests on one idea: your data never has to leave your device. Underdog runs locally on a Mac, an iPhone, or a Windows PC, which Wen has described as a form of local data handling, in contrast to the default-to-the-cloud approach that basically every competitor, from ChatGPT to Gemini to Meta’s Muse, currently relies on.

That’s a meaningfully different technical bet than most AI assistants are making right now, and it comes with real tradeoffs. On-device models are generally smaller and less capable than the frontier cloud models running at OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic, simply because a phone or laptop doesn’t have anywhere near the computing horsepower of a data center full of GPUs. Underdog is explicitly trading some raw capability for the promise that nothing you tell it gets logged, trained on, or handed to an ad network.

The business model is the other unusual piece. Rather than a monthly subscription or an ad-supported free tier, both standard across the industry now, Underdog reportedly makes money through payment fees, meaning it only takes a cut when it actually completes a transaction on your behalf, like booking something or buying something. No subscription, no ads, no revenue unless the assistant does something useful enough to result in a purchase. It’s a model that aligns the company’s incentives with the user actually getting something done, which is rarer than it should be in consumer software.

Conway Research has backing from Andreessen Horowitz, among other investors, which matters for credibility in a space where a small operation, no matter how good the idea, struggles to convince people their offline assistant isn’t secretly phoning home anyway. Independent verification of exactly how local Underdog’s processing really is will likely take time, since privacy claims in software are easy to state and harder to audit from the outside.

Still, the bet is a reasonable one to make right now. A meaningful slice of the public has grown uneasy with how much of daily life runs through AI products that quietly collect everything typed into them. Whether that unease is big enough to support a paid, intentionally less powerful assistant is the real question Underdog is about to answer.

Related: Mistral’s new open-weight model release and the fight over which AI agents get access to shopping sites.

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