Guides · for everyone · updated August 2026
Can your AI find files on your computer? Yes, here's how.
An AI assistant can't see your hard drive by itself. Give it Interlinked Files (a local index of everything on the machine) and “pull up everything from the Meridian deal” becomes a working request: answered from your own disk, in milliseconds, nothing uploaded.
How it works, without the jargon
Your AI apps can be handed tools
Modern AI apps (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, and many more) support a standard way of being given abilities (it's called MCP; you never have to think about it). A tool can be 'search this computer's files'.
One install connects them all
The Interlinked Files installer sets up the index and registers the search tool with the AI apps it finds on your machine: over a dozen supported, zero per-app setup. Restart the AI app and it simply knows how to search your files.
Then you just ask
“Find the invoice from March.” “What do we have on the Henderson renewal?” The AI searches the index (names and the text inside PDFs, notes, and code) and gets each file's connections too: the spreadsheet it was worked on with, the note saying the renewal is due Q3.
Why the index matters: without one, an AI hunts the slow way, folder by folder, command by command. We recorded a top AI agent spending 71 tool calls and nearly 7 minutes failing to find one file it could have had in 16 milliseconds with an index.
Common questions
Can ChatGPT or Claude search my computer's files?
Not by themselves: an AI assistant has no view of your hard drive. But AI apps that support tools (the MCP standard: Claude, Cursor, Copilot, and many others) can be given a local file-search tool. Interlinked Files is that tool: one install, and your AI can find any file on the machine by name or by the text inside it.
Do my files get uploaded to the AI company?
The index never leaves your computer. Searching happens locally, in milliseconds. What your AI does with the results it reads is governed by that AI app's own privacy policy, same as anything else you show it. Interlinked Files itself sends no file contents anywhere.
Is this only for programmers?
No. The install is one signed setup file, and it connects itself to the AI apps on your machine: no configuration files, nothing to type. After that you just ask in plain words: 'find the invoice from March', 'pull up everything about the Henderson renewal'.
Why does the AI need an index? Can't it just look through my folders?
It can, and that's the problem: without an index, an AI searches the slow way, folder by folder, command by command. We measured a top AI agent taking 71 tool calls and nearly 7 minutes to find one file. The same request with an index is one call and about 16 milliseconds.
Everything local is free forever, no card. Download for Windows · and it's a search box for you too, AI or not: find a file you lost.