Privacy

In short, your writing stays on your Mac. Iliad has no accounts and no tracking. Nothing leaves your Mac until you ask the AI for help (or, once, to name a new untitled document), and then only the document you're working on goes out. With the free AI, neither Iliad nor Groq keeps it.

Updated 14 October 2026 · Iliad MD 0.7.0

Your documents

Your documents are ordinary Markdown files in a folder you choose. Iliad opens and saves them on your Mac. It never uploads them anywhere.

Comments you leave on a document are saved in a file next to it, in the same folder (for example chapter.comments.md). They are yours like any other file, and they are never sent to the AI.

When text leaves your Mac

Only when you ask. The one exception is naming a new untitled document. Typing never sends anything. Text is sent when you press a suggestion key (⌘, sentence, ⌘. paragraph, ⌘/ full idea) or pick an action in the ✦ AI menu, and once to name an untitled document you created. This is all that goes out.

• For a suggestion at your cursor, Iliad sends the document you're writing, with its title and headings, so the suggestion fits the rest of it. Long documents are trimmed to the part around your cursor and their opening. That is up to about 6,000 characters for a sentence, 15,000 for a paragraph and 40,000 for a full idea. If you use Steer…, it also sends the direction you typed.
• For ✦ AI on a selection, it sends your selection and the instruction you typed or picked, with the document around it (up to about 20,000 characters) so the edit fits.
• To name an untitled document, it sends the opening of a new document you created, once (up to 1,500 characters), so Iliad can give the file a name. Documents that already have a name are never sent for this.
• Your writing preferences, if you set any in Settings → Writing, go with every suggestion and ✦ AI request (not with naming). They are saved on your Mac only, never in your documents.

Nothing more. Iliad never sends your folder, your other documents or your comments. The answer comes back to your Mac only, and nothing changes in your document until you accept it.

The AI runs on Groq, with the openai/gpt-oss-120b model. How the text gets there depends on which of the two ways you use it.

Free AI (the default)

With no key of your own, your request goes from your Mac to Iliad's AI server, which passes it to Groq and streams the answer back. Three parties are involved.

• Cloudflare runs Iliad's AI server (a Cloudflare Worker). It carries your request, including the text, and sees your internet address, as any network in the path does. Logging on Iliad's server is turned off. Cloudflare's own handling of traffic follows Cloudflare's privacy policy.
• Groq writes the answer. It receives the text from Iliad's server, not from your Mac, so it doesn't see your internet address. Zero Data Retention is on for Iliad's Groq account (checked on 25 September 2026), so Groq doesn't keep the text or the answer. How Groq handles data.
• Iliad (that's me) doesn't store your text, the answer, or your internet address. To keep the free AI fair and its cost bounded, the server keeps only daily counters of how many requests each install made and how many came from each network. An install is a random ID. A network is a one-way scrambled code of your internet address that changes every day, so it can't be turned back into the address or linked across days. The counters are deleted within 48 hours.

The random install ID is created the first time you use the free AI and saved on your Mac. It is not linked to your name, email, Mac or documents. Requests also carry the app's version number, so an old version can be asked to update.

The free AI has a daily limit, reset at 00:00 UTC. When it runs out, Iliad tells you when it comes back. There is no counter to watch and nothing is queued.

Your own Groq key (optional)

In Settings → Writing → Use my key you can paste a Groq API key. From then on, requests go straight from your Mac to Groq, with no Iliad server in between and no daily limit from Iliad.

• What you send is covered by your own Groq account and its terms. By default Groq may keep requests for up to 30 days, only to troubleshoot or investigate abuse. You can turn on Zero Data Retention in your Groq account's Data Controls.
• Your key is stored only on your Mac, encrypted and protected by the macOS Keychain. Iliad sends it only to Groq, once to check it before saving and then with each request.
• Iliad never switches ways on its own. If your key stops working, Iliad tells you. It doesn't quietly send your text through the free route instead.

Other times Iliad goes online

• Checking for updates. Iliad asks GitHub whether there is a new version. GitHub sees your internet address, as any website would. Nothing about your documents is sent.
• Finding the AI server. With the free AI, Iliad may read a small file from iliad.md, at most once a day, that says where Iliad's AI server is. It asks for nothing about you. It's like visiting this website.
• YouTube videos. If a document contains a YouTube link, Iliad shows the video using YouTube's privacy-enhanced player (youtube-nocookie.com). YouTube sees that request, as it would in a browser.

Claude Code, Codex and other tools

If you let an AI tool like Claude Code or Codex work in your folder, that tool follows its own privacy terms. Iliad only shows you, on your Mac, what the tool changed.

This website

iliad.md counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics. It sets no cookies and does not identify you, but Cloudflare sees your internet address, as Google Fonts does for the fonts and GitHub does for the download.

Questions

Iliad and its AI server are made and run by Sebastián Marambio. Both are open source, so anyone can check all of this in the code. If something here is unclear, ask me on GitHub. If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.