Carson

Carson is a desktop AI agent built around two ideas: adaptive interfaces and serious security. Instead of trapping the agent in a chat bubble, Carson generates custom, task specific workspaces on demand, for example a unified pane that pulls together email, research and LinkedIn while drafting outreach, or a branded slide deck a user can edit through natural language. It connects to work tools such as email, calendar and Slack, carries out multi step knowledge work, and can create and run automations described in plain language, like sending prepared slides to Slack whenever a new intro meeting appears. Its defining feature is runtime level security: a user can tell Carson it may email certain addresses but must ask before others, and that boundary is enforced at the runtime so the agent literally cannot act outside its granted permissions, rather than relying on a model being told to make no mistakes. Positioned as more capable than a general knowledge work assistant and more secure than open ended computer use agents, Carson is designed to be installed inside a company. It was built by a Y Combinator team whose founders previously built secure deployment infrastructure for untrusted workloads and red teamed AI systems at Palantir, Robust Intelligence and Snowflake.