Is local AI more private than cloud AI?
Yes, and for a structural reason rather than a policy one. The interesting question is what you trade for it.
Yes, structurally. A cloud AI must ship your text to a server to work; privacy there is a policy you have to trust. A local AI runs on your machine, so the question becomes whether the software around the model sends anything, which you can check by blocking the network entirely and seeing what still works. Local gives up some capability for this, and the trade is real.
Two different trust models.
Every cloud request carries your text to someone else's computer, so privacy there rests on terms: retention windows, training opt-outs, enterprise agreements. Those terms can be strong, and serious providers honor them, but they are promises you verify after the fact. Local AI needs none of them, because the computation happens on your hardware and there is no wire your document ever travels down. The claim becomes checkable in a way policy is not: the private-chat checklist works because each item is a fact about where code runs, not a sentence in a terms page.
What local gives up.
An honest comparison names the cost. Local models are smaller, so they know less, reason less broadly, and phrase less brilliantly than frontier cloud models; compression makes them fit on ordinary hardware but does not close the scale gap. What narrows the gap is the task: when a tool answers from retrieved passages and cites them, the model's job is reading and selecting, which small models manage well. For open-ended drafting where breadth matters, cloud remains the stronger choice, and pretending otherwise would be the same salesmanship local AI complains about elsewhere.
How to compare a tool you are offered.
Ask where each step runs. Inference: on your machine or a server? Embeddings and search: local index or cloud API? Telemetry: any network traffic not triggered by you? What a fetch sends: only the URL, or the document? The full question list for local RAG covers these, and the same questions sort cloud tools: some process on your side and send little, most send everything. Privacy is a property of the architecture, so read the architecture, not the marketing around it.