AI Passport vs Vilix AI: Which Actually Carries Your Context Between ChatGPT, Claude, and Other AI Tools?

Quick answer: These two products answer different versions of the same question. AI Passport (Egoist Machines, launched October 2026, Y Combinator-backed) is a permission-based portability layer for your personal data: tell ChatGPT something and Claude can know it, but only through an inbox you review, with per-request permission and sensitive details like dates of birth never shared without explicit approval. A shared memory layer is for work context instead: decisions, projects, rules and full conversation history that every tool reads and writes over MCP, with the newest correction becoming the truth everywhere. Pick by what you need to carry: your personal data with a permission gate, or your working context with no gate at all.

What AI Passport actually does

Egoist Machines announced AI Passport on October 7, 2026, alongside a $3M seed round with participation from Y Combinator, and the framing in the announcement is precise: a permission-based way to make your personal context portable across AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, while you keep ownership of it. Signup is free at ego.ist.

The mechanics work like this. AI Passport connects to your apps through roughly 800 integrations spanning AI assistants plus email, calendar, productivity tools and wearables, with more added regularly. When you add information in a connected app, like travel plans or a preferred writing style, it syncs into a user-owned inbox. You periodically review the inbox and decide per item whether it can be shared with your other apps, stays only in the original app, or gets deleted entirely.

Connected apps can also request information about you, and you set defaults for accepting those requests. Sensitive fields get special treatment: Egoist says dates of birth, for example, require explicit approval before they are shared, no matter what your defaults say.

The honest cost of the passport model is that you are the bottleneck. Every transfer waits on your review. For personal data, that is exactly the point: control is the feature. For working context that changes hourly, the same control becomes a queue you have to clear before anything moves.

What a shared memory layer actually does

A shared memory layer is built for the opposite situation: context that should move without you in the loop. Each AI client connects to one account over MCP, and everything it saves, exchanges, decisions, tasks, rules, is readable from every other connected tool. When two tools save conflicting information, the most recent save becomes the truth, so you correct something once and every tool sees it.

Vilix AI is one example of this model: cloud-hosted with zero infrastructure for you to manage, the same memory follows you across phone apps, laptop and every connected AI tool, and it stores full conversation history, not just extracted facts, retrieved with semantic plus keyword search. Nothing needs your per-request approval, because the context belongs to your own work and the tools doing the work are yours. You can export everything or delete it anytime, and getting started costs nothing: the free plan is free forever, and the Pro trial runs 7 days with no credit card.

Think of it this way: if your scheduled lead-triage agent wakes up at 6am and needs the qualification rules you changed last night, there is nobody awake to approve a transfer. It should just read the newest version. That is the shape a memory layer is designed for.

The side-by-side

How to choose without overthinking it

Ask one question: does the context need your permission to move?

If the answer is yes, because the data is personal and the whole point is that nothing crosses tools without your say-so, you want the passport model. Review the inbox, set the defaults, and treat the occasional review queue as the price of control.

If the answer is no, because the context is your own working state and the whole point is that your agents never start blank again, you want the shared layer. Connect the tools you actually use, correct things once, and let the newest truth follow you from the laptop to the scheduled run to the phone.

The confusion is that both are called "sharing context." A passport shares your data with apps. A memory layer shares your work with your tools. They solve different problems, and picking the wrong one gives you either an approval queue where you needed zero friction, or zero friction where you needed an approval queue.

If your problem is agents waking up blind between runs, start with the memory layer: Vilix AI is free forever, no credit card required.