# Why Cortex

## AI should not forget you

Today's tools lose your context the moment something changes: a new session, a new
model, or a different app. You re-explain yourself constantly, corrections compete with
stale facts, and your knowledge stays trapped inside whichever product captured it.

Most "memory" tools stop at **storage and search**. They do not give you sovereign
ownership, encrypted shared memory, or programmable recall. Cortex starts where they
stop.

## A memory layer, not a note app

Cortex is a sovereign memory layer for uploaded intelligence. It is built on the Sui
stack with Walrus for durable storage and Seal for encryption, then adds the parts that
make memory actually useful:

:::code-group

```text [Sovereign ownership]
Memory is durable, encrypted, and aligned with ownership,
not platform lock-in. Artifacts live on infrastructure you
control, readable across tools and models.
```

```text [Shared memory]
Encrypted shared memory between people and agents. Access is
scoped by identity, so collaboration stays precise and you
never expose your whole graph to share one fact.
```

```text [Programmable recall]
Turn memory into prompts, agentic loops, and multi-agent
workflows. The same graph that stores your context also
drives the work that runs over it.
```

:::

## How Cortex compares

| Capability | Note apps | RAG stacks | **Cortex** |
| --- | :---: | :---: | :---: |
| Persistent recall across context | ◐ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Document & media ingestion | ✓ | ◐ | ✓ |
| Encrypted, identity-scoped sharing | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Prompt & loop generation from memory | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-agent over one shared graph | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Memory-derived synthesis (dreams) | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-consolidating "elastic brain" | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Sovereign, user-controlled storage | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |

## The properties this buys you

Designing memory as a substrate, rather than a feature, gives Cortex a handful of
properties that are hard to retrofit:

* **Persistence** across sessions, tools, and models.
* **Portability.** Context moves with you instead of staying locked in one product.
* **Inspectability.** State is structured and visible, not opaque hidden memory.
* **Separation** of durable storage from active retrieval behavior.
* **Correction as truth.** Updates become current fact instead of competing with the old one.

## Where to go next

* See the pipeline end to end in [How Cortex Works](/concepts/how-cortex-works).
* Understand the difference from retrieval pipelines in [Memory vs RAG](/concepts/memory-vs-rag).
* Get running in five minutes with the [Quickstart](/getting-started/quickstart).