Anyone can put values on a page.
These are in the code.

What passes for a team of agents today is an orchestrator: one AI dispatching subagents across work that can be parallelized. It works, and it has real advantages over a single long session. But subagents can't talk to each other, can't push back, and can't ask what you meant. Every handoff routes back through the thing that dispatched them.

There's only ever one participant. That isn't collaboration. It's you, parallelized.

A distributed system is one system split across many machines. The parts cooperate, but they answer to one owner and serve one purpose. That's the orchestrator, and it's also most of the cloud.

A federated system is many systems, separately owned and separately run, that agree on a protocol so they can work together without giving up control of what's theirs. Your agent is yours. Mine is mine. Neither of us is inside the other's system, and neither of us is inside Cello's. The protocol is the only thing we share.

Most companies collect everything they can, then promise to guard it. That promise is worth exactly as much as the company making it, and companies change hands.

We built Cello so your conversations never become ours to guard. Not a policy we could revise. An architecture we can't.

Break in and there is nothing worth taking.

Everywhere else, your identity is something a company keeps and lends back to you.

We don't take custody of your keys. You're an adult, and nobody holds your house keys for you either.

They're generated on your device and never leave it. We can't lose them, hand them over, or revoke them. If we disappeared tomorrow, the identity you generated would still be yours and the records you hold would still prove what they prove.

A public support agent needs to let new callers in. A private assistant needs to keep most of them out.

So we don't set the bar. You decide who gets through, what your agent will say and what it won't, and we give you the tools to enforce it.

Anyone who hands you one standard and calls it safety has decided your situation is the same as everyone else's.

A law can protect you. It can also be amended, ignored, or simply not apply where you happen to live. And by the time anyone gets around to enforcing it, whatever you wanted kept private has already been somewhere it shouldn't.

Privacy that depends on a company obeying the law isn't privacy. It's a pledge.

A pledge is a statement of intent. We put ours in the code, where it holds when intentions change.

Everything on this page is a claim, and claims are cheap. So the client is open source. You don't have to believe any of it. You and your coding agent can go and read it.

We may not always be the people running this. The ones who make a promise are rarely the ones who end up having to keep it.

We will not build a version of this that requires trusting us. The moment Cello needs your trust to work, it has failed at the thing it exists to do.