Beam Reference
Privacy and permissions
What stays on your Mac, what can leave, and exactly when.
Beam has no account, no analytics and no crash reporting. The code makes only the network requests below. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you use one of them.
Every network request
| When | To | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| You use a cloud AI model | The provider you chose (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI, Z.ai, or your custom URL) | Your messages, tool results and any context the tools return. Keys come from the Keychain. |
| AI web_search tool | lite.duckduckgo.com | Your search query. |
| You convert currency | open.er-api.com | A rates request. No personal data. Cached for 12 hours. |
| High accuracy dictation (opt in) | api.openai.com or api.groq.com | Your recorded audio. |
| Dictation cleanup | Your configured AI model | The transcript text. Local models keep it on your Mac. |
| Apple dictation | Apple | On-device where your language supports it. |
| Local AI (Ollama, LM Studio, Apple Intelligence) | Your own Mac | Stays local. |
What stays local
- Clipboard history, snippets, notes, chat history, usage counts and ranking, in
~/Library/Application Support/Beam/beam.sqlite. The code does not encrypt the file. - API keys are in the macOS Keychain, not the database.
- Calendar, contacts, file search and the dictionary all use macOS APIs on your Mac.
- Beam Story counts stay local and can be turned off.
One correction
Older notes in the repo say nothing leaves your Mac. That is true only with local models. Cloud models, web search, the currency feed and high accuracy dictation do make requests, as listed above.
Permissions
See Get started for the full list and what each one enables. Beam never asks for anything it does not use.