After Rewind and Humane: the case for AI you actually own

In February 2025, HP bought Humane’s assets for about $116 million and closed the AI Pin business. At noon Pacific on February 28, the Pins stopped talking to Humane’s servers — no calls, no messaging, no AI, no cloud — and user data was deleted server-side (TechCrunch, Axios). Hardware people paid hundreds of dollars for became, almost overnight, inert.

It wasn’t an isolated event. Rewind — a Mac app that recorded your screen so you could search your own past — rebranded to Limitless in April 2024 and pivoted to a cloud-connected pendant, moving the memory off your machine and onto its servers (TechCrunch). Once the data lives on someone else’s servers, its fate follows the company’s, not yours.

Why this keeps happening

This is not carelessness. It is the business model. A cloud-dependent product has to keep paying for servers, so its survival is tied to funding, acquisition terms, and policy. When the economics change, the cheapest move is to turn the service off — and because the data and the logic both sit on the vendor’s infrastructure, “off” means gone. The user never owned the thing; they rented access to it.

What owning your AI actually requires

“Local” as a marketing label is not enough. Ownership is a structural property with three concrete tests:

• Your data is files on your disk — not an account on a server. If the company disappears, the files are still yours.
• Core function works offline — the assistant can run without a live connection to any vendor, so no one can remotely disable it.
• Clean export, no lock-in — you can take everything with you, and switch the underlying model without losing your history.

If a product fails any of these, an acquisition or a pricing decision can still switch it off.

Where DeTars stands

This is the test DeTars is built to pass: its memory and identity are files on your own disk, new memories are kept only with your confirmation, and the core loop runs locally. (Honest boundary: always-on ambient companionship is still on the roadmap — see why it’s reliable.) The point isn’t that owning your AI is a nice feature. After 2025, it’s the difference between a tool you keep and a tool that can be taken away.