A library for everything you've ever signed, scanned, or saved.
ATHENS is a local-first macOS document library. It imports your PDFs, images, and files into a Finder-visible vault, OCRs and classifies them with on-device AI, and lets you ask questions across the archive — without sending a single page to the cloud.
The Library
ATHENS is built around a single belief: sensitive documents should stay on the Mac. Originals live in a Finder-visible vault. Text extraction, OCR, classification, embeddings, and chat answers all run on-device against local GGUF models. Network access is reserved for one task — downloading the models you choose to install.
Originals live in ~/Documents/Athenaeum Library — a folder you can open, back up, and trust like any other.
Apple Vision handles native OCR. A controlled 1,100-term vocabulary plus local LLM tagging organize the archive — no third-party classifier ever sees your files.
A local vector index over your document chunks powers retrieval-augmented chat. Ask questions; get cited answers, generated on-device.
ATHENS reads your unified memory at launch and picks the lightest model lineup that does the job. 8 GB Mac to Workstation — overridable in Settings.
Hardware Tiers
ATHENS auto-detects unified memory and chooses a model lineup that fits. The user can override the tier in Settings; everything downstream re-embeds and re-tags automatically.
ATHENS stays on your Mac by design. No accounts, no analytics, no cloud sync. Read exactly how data is handled.
Read the Privacy Policy