Privacy and Security

Argus is built to keep your data on your own machine. This page lays out what it reads, what it stores and the few times anything leaves your computer.

Open source and local

Argus is a free and open source tool, MIT licensed, so you can read exactly what it does. It runs entirely on your own computer. Installing it and browsing your usage needs no account and no server.

Indexing and storage

Argus finds and indexes the sessions your AI agents have already saved to your own disk (see Supported Agents for the locations it reads). Indexing is entirely local: it reads those files, pulls out the useful details and saves them to a local index, a database on your computer. It doesn't watch your screen or record anything as you work. Everything it needs is already on disk.

Task interpretation and model providers

Task interpretation is the one part of Argus that uses a model to read your sessions. It's on by default, and you choose which model provider does the reading, or turn it off entirely. To judge how a task went, Argus sends that task's prompts and responses to the provider you chose, so some of your session content is shared with that provider. The default sends it to Anthropic through your Claude sign-in; the hosted providers send it to their own services. Only a local model run through the Command provider keeps it on your machine. See Tasks for the full picture.

API keys

When you use a provider that needs an API key, Argus stores the key in your operating system's secure store (the Keychain on macOS), never in its settings file and never on any server. It reads the key from there only to call the provider you configured.

Updates

The desktop app checks for new versions on a schedule and downloads them in the background. The Updates setting in Settings controls whether new versions automatically install; with it off, Argus still checks and tells you when one is ready, and you install it from the menu bar. The command-line tool doesn't check for updates at all.

Argus Hub

By default, Argus uploads nothing. If your organization runs an Argus Hub, you can opt in to sync a snapshot of your usage to it, so an ops leader can see agent use across the team. Two things to know:

• The Hub is hosted by your own organization, not by The Agent Deployment Company. Your data goes to your company's server, not to us.
• What's sent stays minimal. A sync carries your metrics and task data (usage totals, breakdowns, outcomes and the like), plus a few short text snippets: a session's opening prompt and the brief evidence behind a task's judgment. The full text of your sessions is never uploaded.