Conway Research founder Sigil Wen announced the launch of Underdog, a private personal AI designed to run on users' existing devices. According to ChainCatcher, Wen said the project has received support from a16z, Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird VC, Anthology, and several AI industry figures including Patrick Collison, Naval, Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, Thomas Wolf, and Logan Kilpatrick.

The company said Underdog aims to provide free, usable, reliable, and private AI to billions of people. It also introduced Underdog's Law, which states that frontier intelligence will reach user devices within six months. The project will begin with fast AI that can run on consumer hardware and will focus on co-designing models and inference engines to improve capability, speed, power use, and data efficiency.

Underdog's research will cover agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI could reshape the internet economy. The announcement said privacy and capability do not need to be a trade-off.