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 are three small helpers, and they’re 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 helpers 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 are three exceptions, and you should hear about them from us rather than find them. None of them ever touches an encrypted note.

Suggest title reads a note and proposes a name for it. The text goes to OpenAI, or a copy of the note’s first picture if there’s no text yet. 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, from the words on the page. A folder on your Mac or PC can also use the picture, the way the button does.

Guess the notebook is a second watched-folder switch. It reads each file the folder imports and moves it to the notebook it fits best. To do that, it sends the file’s text and name to a company called TypeSafe, along with your notebook names, their stacks, and a few recent note titles from each. It can’t pick a notebook without knowing what each one holds. It’s in the web app now, and in the other apps from their next update.

Summarize this recording is a button on a finished transcript. Press it and the transcript goes to AssemblyAI, the company that transcribed it, and comes back as a short version. It runs only when you press it, on the recording you pressed it on.

Those two folder switches are the only things that hand your note text to an AI without you pressing a button. So both are off unless you turn them on, and you turn each one on a folder at a time, knowing exactly which files it covers.

None of them reads what’s inside your other notes. What gets sent is a note or recording you pressed the button on, or a file you dropped into a folder you switched one of these on for. The guess also sends the file’s name, plus your notebook names, their stacks and a few recent note titles from each. But it is AI, so we’re not going to pretend otherwise.

Two more things use machine learning without being an assistant. OCR reads the text in your images and PDFs as you add them, so search can find it. Transcription turns a recording into text when you press Transcribe. We keep a list of which notes apps have AI built in, and how to turn it off, and Harbor is on it.

The full story is at Bring Your Own AI.