habenula · huh-BEN-yuh-luh · noun. Brain region, from the Latin habena, "reins" — a hub for value-based decision-making; the mind's brake.
Your agents on your terms.
Habenula is the open control harness for personal AI agents: the permissions, spending limits, verifiable audit trail, and real kill switch that keep capable agents accountable to you.
Try the governance loop
You approve each consequential action on Habenula’s surface, never inside the agent’s chat. The ticker shows the runtime evaluate it, log it, then run it. Credentials never enter the model.
A guided walkthrough. Pick a choice to advance.
The stakes
The industry shipped the power and skipped the controls.
They gave machines the freedom to impersonate us. They hid what the machine is actually weighted to do. They shipped systems with no hard rule against harming the user. They built the product on work they did not pay for. They made your own data theirs by default. They shipped agents that act on the world, governed by a dialog box. They knew the vulnerabilities and shipped anyway. And underneath all of it: they dismantled the brakes to win the race.
You hold the reins
More capable machines should mean more control for you, not less.
Our unique approach
Personal controls you can verify.
The gate isn't the model: every action meets a binding policy you can inspect, and every decision lands on a record you recompute yourself. Nothing you grant is permanent — the strongest is "for this session," never "always allow."
What it's built around
The model does the thinking. Habenula governs the doing.
Six guarantees, enforced by the system — not features you configure and hope hold.
Open source
Control you can't verify isn't control.
Everything that holds your credentials, decides what your agent may do, and records what it did is open — AGPL v3, with the audit-log verifier under MIT so anyone can check our records independently. Read it, run it, hold us to it.
As intelligence compounds
The controls are the interface that lasts.
Ready to govern your agents?
The machines are going to run more of ordinary life every year. Someone has to make sure that stays your life, on your terms. Habenula is in early stages and building in public. Your feedback and interest are warmly welcomed.
New releases and the occasional product update.