Introducing Ichnus: a free assistant from a non-profit

Today Ichnus is live. It is a free AI assistant — the kind of thing you use for drafting, research, questions, and the thousands of small cognitive jobs that make up a working life. It is built by Curos, a non-profit, which means it answers to no shareholders and sells no ads and no data.

We built Ichnus because we believe the argument we made in our founding letter: AI is becoming infrastructure, and infrastructure should serve everyone. That belief had to become a product, or it was just a slogan.

Three tiers, one assistant

Ichnus is powered by three model tiers, each tuned for a different job:

• Krus is the fast, lightweight tier — built for everyday questions and quick drafts, running at scale without the wait.
• Mantus is the balanced all-rounder — the default for most work, with strong reasoning and comfortable speed.
• Corus is our frontier model — for deep research, complex reasoning, and genuinely hard problems. Available free, with fair-use limits so it stays available.

You do not have to think about the tiers to use Ichnus. The assistant picks the right one for your question, and you can switch explicitly when you want control.

What “free” means

Free means free. There is no ad-supported tier, no paywall after the first month, no “free” that quietly sells your conversations. Curos is funded by grants, donations, and at-cost services for organizations — not by you, not by your data.

What we are testing ourselves on

This is a launch, and launches are where we prove we meant the transparency talk. Over the next year we will publish how we are funded, how we evaluate our models, and how we govern the product. The first transparency report is already scheduled. We expect you to hold us to it.

Go use it. Tell us where it is wrong. That is the whole point of building it this way.

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