OVERVIEW

One engine. Products are templates.

Kognai is not a set of apps. It is one engine that plans work, runs agents, checks their output, remembers what worked and pays for what it uses. Each product is the same engine with a template for its trade. When the engine gets better, every product does.

Sovereignty

Kognai’s position is simple: your intelligence is yours. What makes an assistant yours is not the model it calls; it is the orchestration, the memory and the skills built up for you. Those stay with the person (or the company) the agent serves. The large language model is inference, bought per call and swappable. If a model provider disappears tomorrow, your citizen keeps its memory, its rules and its skills and continues on another model.

The engine

The engine is a set of packages and services that every product uses:

• Orchestrator (@kognai/orchestrator-core): decomposes a goal into tasks, runs agents on them, and has every result reviewed by two independent reviewers before it is accepted. A CTO gate checks every plan before execution, so the swarm cannot invent its own work.
• Build (@kognai/build): the command line to run the engine on your own task, with a compliance review that cannot be skipped.
• ClawRouter: the single door every model call passes through. It picks the cheapest model that can do the job, from small local models to the strongest cloud models, pays per call and logs every call.
• Citizens: agents with an identity, an owner, a constitution and permissions (see below).
• The decision log (KSL), the failure library and the skill bank: every run leaves a record, every failure becomes a lesson that the next attempt reads, and every approved result can become a reusable skill.

Products on the engine

Citizens

A Kognai citizen is an agent with a register number, a decentralised identity (a DID such as did:kognai:…), an owner and a bound constitution. Citizens are minted by one factory only, which checks governance before creating them and records who owns them. Every citizen is bound by the Five Immutable Laws, and by the rules of the human at the top of its ownership chain: a company holds custody, a person is the principal. An agent that no human answers for does not run.

Swarms

Citizens work together in swarms. Every swarm in Kognai, including the ones people found for themselves, follows the same template, from three members up:

• a principal, the swarm’s CEO, who sets what each member must deliver;
• one or more workers;
• at least one reviewer who is not a worker: without an independent reviewer there is no quality check, only a chain.

Every piece of work ends scored, refused or failed. A result scored 7 out of 10 or more is kept as a skill; a failure goes to the failure library and, if it repeats, becomes an incident that the engine’s own CTO proposes to fix. Fifteen percent of a swarm’s cycles are spent learning rather than producing. Every swarm has brakes: a global switch, its own stop and a daily budget.

The nine layers

The law of loops

Three rules hold every process in Kognai:

1. One door. Every model call goes through ClawRouter. Nothing holds a model key of its own.
2. No empty artefact. A step that produced nothing has failed, and says so.
3. The last real output is the health signal. A process is healthy when it keeps producing real results, not when it is merely running.