Answers · a straight answer, sourced
Does Ollama store my conversations and memory?
No — Ollama is a model server, not a memory system: it runs the model and returns tokens, and any lasting record of your conversations or facts about you lives in whatever application is calling Ollama, so the question "is my history stored, and does it leave?" is really a question about that front-end, not about Ollama.
This trips people up because "I run Ollama locally" feels like a complete private-AI setup. It is only the engine. Ollama holds the model weights and a short working context for a running request; it does not maintain your chat history, extract durable memory, index your documents, or export anything. If your front-end keeps history, that front-end decides where it is stored and whether it syncs anywhere.
So the privacy of an Ollama-based stack is the privacy of the layer on top. A browser extension talking to Ollama might still send your prompts through a cloud analytics service; a desktop app might store history in a cloud account. Ollama being local does not make them local.
SovereignAI is designed to be that top layer done right: your conversations, memory, and documents live in a local SQLite database in a folder you can copy, deletion zeroes the bytes, nothing reports to a control plane, and the whole workspace exports to one checksummed file you can verify. It talks to Ollama (or a frontier API, disclosed when used) for the tokens, and owns everything Ollama deliberately does not.
Own the answer, not just read it
SovereignAI is private AI you run yourself: local models, memory with receipts, disclosure at the moment anything leaves, and an exit you can verify. The trial is one Docker command, and deleting the volume deletes every trace of you.