Does Harbor have built-in AI?

Not in the way the question usually means. No assistant, no chatbot, nothing reading your library — and that’s a decision, not a gap. There is one small helper, and it’s near the bottom of this page.

Here’s the thinking. You likely already pay for ChatGPT, Claude, or something like them, and they are better than anything a notes company would bolt on. We also watched Evernote graft on a proprietary AI and lean on it to justify price increases. We’re not doing that: no AI assistant baked in, no “smart” features running over your notes, no AI line item hiding in your bill.

What Harbor has instead is openness:

• a documented REST API (with a full OpenAPI spec),
• a real command-line client, the harbor CLI,
• an agent skill your AI coding assistant can install, and
• a first-class MCP server.

Together they mean the AI you already have can create, edit, organize, format, and search your notes — working for you, in your tools, on your terms. The how-to is in How do I connect ChatGPT or Claude to Harbor?

Two things this design means in practice:

1. Nothing reads your notes by default. Apart from the one helper below, AI only touches your library when you connect one and hand it a token you control.
2. An encrypted note leaves our servers as ciphertext, because ciphertext is all we hold — so an assistant reading over the API or MCP gets nothing it can use. The harbor CLI is different only because it runs on your machine rather than ours: give it your passphrase and it decrypts there. Your key, your call.

There is one exception, and you should hear it from us rather than find it: Suggest title, which reads a note and proposes a name for it. It never touches an encrypted note. It comes in two shapes:

• The button, on an untitled note. It runs only when you press it, only on the note you’re looking at.
• A watched folder switch, which does the same thing for each file that folder imports. This is the only thing that hands your note text to an AI without you pressing a button — so it is off unless you turn it on, and you turn it on one folder at a time, knowing exactly which files it covers.

Neither one sweeps through your notebooks: the only text sent for a title is a note you pressed the button on, or a file you dropped into a folder you switched this on for. But it is AI, so we’re not going to pretend otherwise.

The full story is at Bring Your Own AI.