Praecise Furcate: machines that keep working
As agents begin to read and act on physical sites, the question is who holds authority over the machines when the network is gone. Furcate is the open operating system that keeps that authority in hardware keys on site, and Praecise Furcate is the hardware, operations and support Praecise builds on it.
Agents are leaving the browser. They will read cameras, meters and sensors, and propose changes to lighting, heating, charging and production lines. The moment software can act on a physical site, a design question becomes a governance question: who holds authority over the machines inside a building when the network outside it fails, or is turned against it? The answer that will last is simple to state and hard to build. Nothing outside the building should be able to stop a machine inside it.
That is the promise behind Furcate. Furcate is the open-source operating system Praecise develops and stewards at furcate.org. Praecise Furcate is what Praecise builds on it: Furcate Leaf, Node and Hub hardware, cells at home, business and city scale, tuned system images, optimised model serving, fleet operations and support.
Authority in the wrong place
Most connected infrastructure answers to a control plane somewhere else. Identity is issued by a registry, commands come from a cloud account, and when the link drops, the site waits. That arrangement was already fragile. With agents in the loop it is untenable, because the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications for 2026 lists tool misuse and identity and privilege abuse among the main ways agent systems fail. An agent that can reach a site's actuators through a remote account inherits every weakness of that account.
Regulation is moving the same way. The EU Cyber Resilience Act's reporting duties for actively exploited vulnerabilities began on 11 September 2026, with an early warning due within 24 hours, a notification within 72 hours and a final report within 14 days of a fix. Operators now need evidence, not assurances, about what runs on their machines.
Identity from silicon, authority with the operator
Furcate puts identity and authority on site. Each machine's name is a public key generated and sealed by its own hardware, with no registry to issue or revoke it. Halt, power-off, isolate and crypto-erase require the operator's own signing key. A network may request a drain, but local policy decides. A site can be administered locally with the uplink disconnected. Policy denies by default, and deny takes precedence over allow. Every decision, including every refusal, is chained into a ledger.
Attestation is graded, from unmanaged through pinned and imaged to measured, and the system does not claim properties the hardware cannot support. That restraint is what makes the rest credible.
Open where trust is claimed
For policymakers and researchers, the licence matters as much as the design. Every Furcate component that makes a trust claim is open source under Apache-2.0: identity, attestation, policy, the ledger, the kill switch, membership and the operator CLI. The default build compiles only the open half, and a build-time test fails if code crosses the boundary between open and enterprise.
Anyone can inspect the parts that decide who may stop a machine. Anyone can build a private, local AI system of their own on boards they can buy. Furcate's Server edition is available now, with ISO, netboot and in-place conversion of a Linux machine already in service. The web and tablet interface, with passkey approval, is coming soon.
Cells that keep working
Praecise Furcate runs homes, businesses and city districts as cells. Each cell is a cluster with its own control and its own authority held in hardware keys, and it keeps working when its link is cut. Cells nest, and each stays in charge of itself, sending summaries upward and never its raw state. The first edge cell runs today; nested cells and the scoped managers that oversee them are coming.
The same identity, policy and record apply whether a site has three machines or thirty thousand. A home lab runs the open base. A business adds leaves and a few nodes. Industrial sites and campuses add the industrial catalogue, and cities and infrastructure run Praecise Furcate across many sites, operated with Praecise.
The hardware and the orders
Praecise designs three pieces of Furcate hardware, all available soon. The Leaf sits beside devices on a bus, in a room or on a panel, gives them an identity, signs their output at the source and enforces interlocks with no network. The Node is the only door to the devices on its segment, running protocol adapters, storage and the provenance log. The Hub runs video and audio models beside existing cameras and microphones, with redaction before anything leaves the site.
A write is treated as an order. It is proposed, checked by policy, approved with a person's passkey where required, signed and rechecked by the leaf that drives the output. Agents read the site through MCP and propose actions, but never act alone; a person approves each one with a passkey. Every reading also says how far it can be trusted, depending on whether it arrived device-native, leaf-signed, bridged or observed.
Who it is for
For CTOs and operators, Praecise Furcate is production infrastructure for sites that must keep running offline: rollout in monitored waves, device posture and quarantine tied to known vulnerabilities, compliance evidence including vulnerability reports for the Cyber Resilience Act deadlines, SBOMs and signed update evidence, and energy and tariff accounting. It speaks the protocols those sites already use, from ONVIF and BACnet to OPC UA, Modbus and OCPP.
For researchers, Furcate is an open, inspectable base for private, local AI and for studying how authority and provenance work at the edge. For policymakers, it shows that the trust properties of edge infrastructure can be open, verifiable and held by the operator rather than a distant platform.
How it connects
Furcate is the operating system layer of the Praecise stack. Praecise Metal is built on Praecise Furcate and gives an operator one ownership view across core clusters and edge cells; it reads ownership and never takes over a cell's control. Praecise Furcate can run fully air-gapped or connect through Praecise Cloud, with the same keys either way. Above Cloud, Praecise Inbox gives machines and agents addresses so a server can write to a person, while Ipnops and Skerry put agents to work on operations and payments.
Infrastructure that answers to its owner
As agents reach into the physical world, the systems worth trusting will be the ones whose authority stays local, whose trust claims are open, and whose every decision is recorded. Furcate is built on those terms, and Praecise Furcate takes it into production. Read more on the Praecise Furcate page.
