# About Primitives

> Primitives is an on-demand cloud for AI agents: isolated databases, filesystems, queues, memory, vaults, key-value stores and object storage per agent, through MCP, SDKs and a REST API.

Source: https://useprimitives.com/about

Primitives builds infrastructure for AI agents. Instead of one shared database, bucket and queue fenced with permissions, every agent gets its own isolated set of primitives: SQLite databases, virtual filesystems, durable queues, typed long-term memory, vaults of secrets it can use but never read, key-value stores and object storage. Each is created in milliseconds and reached through MCP, the TypeScript and Python SDKs, or the REST API.

## Why we built it

Agents break the application model the cloud was designed for. An agent needs a workspace it can trash, fork and throw away, state that survives a pause, and credentials it can use without leaking them into a transcript. Stitching seven services together for every agent is slow, expensive and easy to get wrong, so we put all seven behind one API and one scoped key.

Any primitive can be snapshotted, forked or paused on its own. An agent can try a risky migration on a database branch, hand a sub-agent its own copy of a filesystem, or roll back a bad change, without touching anything else in its group.

## Open source and local-first

The engine, the MCP server and both SDKs are source-available under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-ALv2), which converts to Apache 2.0 after two years. The code lives at https://github.com/useprimitives/primitives.

`primitives dev` runs every primitive on your machine with the same API as the cloud, with no account needed. Self-hosted, every feature is included. Primitives Cloud runs the same engine and charges for operating it: hosting, scoped API keys, the dashboard, backups and the audit log.

## Security by design

Isolation is enforced at the primitive, not in the prompt. API keys and OAuth grants are scoped to one group and an allowlist of tools, every write and secret use is recorded in an audit trail, and vault secrets are injected into outbound requests by reference and redacted from responses, so a model never sees them.

## Contact

Email hi@useprimitives.com for sales, support, security reports or press. Enterprise customers can talk to us about dedicated regions, bring-your-own-cloud deployments, SSO and DPAs.