MakeUseOf: “For a long time, I didn’t think twice about pasting a contract into ChatGPT, uploading a confidential report to ask for a summary, or feeding a client proposal into a cloud AI tool. Then one day I actually stopped and read a terms of service document (something I’d been lazily skimming for years) and the realization hit me: these files were leaving my machine and living, at least temporarily, on someone else’s servers. And interestingly, I realized that a former colleague had once covered why you shouldn’t trust ChatGPT with confidential information. That discomfort sent me looking for a better way. What I found was AnythingLLM, a free, open-source desktop app that lets you build a fully private AI assistant from your own documents — and does it entirely on your device. It has become one of the open-source AI apps I use every day. Here’s what switching over actually looked like…”