Arbiter's brain runs on your GPU
Provider-agnostic should not stop at the providers. Arbiter can use a local model on your own hardware for routing assistance, without requiring a cloud call in that decision path.
It is easy to call yourself provider-agnostic when you pool a few API keys. It is harder once you notice that the thing choosing which provider to use is itself a call to one of them. An orchestrator whose own brain lives in someone’s cloud is not neutral. It just moved the lock-in one layer down.
Arbiter’s brain runs on your machine. The model that decides how to route a task is a small local model on your own GPU, set up with a guided install step. After that, the decision layer makes no network call at all.
What the local brain does
Two jobs, both on-device:
- Routing triage. When a task arrives without an explicit class, the local model reads it and classifies it, and that classification picks the route: which capability tier, which provider, which model.
- Direct inference. Work that does not need a frontier cloud model can run against the local brain directly.
That is the scope, stated plainly. The brain triages and answers. It does not grade another model’s output or sign off on risky actions. Those are settled by explicit rules rather than an LLM’s opinion, and every routing decision Arbiter makes is recorded with the reasons behind it, so the path a task took is auditable after the fact instead of a black box.
Safety policy stays in the route
Cost matters, but sensitive work should not be decided on price alone. Arbiter supports configured safety policy and approvals around routing; the learned optimization layer is still being hardened for release.
Bring your accounts; it routes around the walls
Arbiter can apply configured routing and scheduling policy to the accounts you connect. It runs with zero providers too: the local brain and shell work need none, and every provider, client, or sibling tool you add remains optional. A background daemon and native desktop GUI use local IPC by default; the authenticated HTTP control plane is optional.
Where it stands
Arbiter is a proprietary working alpha in public binary release preparation. The design that stays agnostic all the way down to a local decision brain is the part we will not compromise.
It is the layer that dispatches Warden across providers and orchestrates TheAuditor’s analysis, alongside Curator and BenchProctor. The full scope is in Introducing Arbiter, or follow the public release channel and the RSS feed.