AI ENGINE

BETA

An engineer that reads your fleet, and asks before it acts.

Bring your own model key. The engine has the whole context of your infrastructure and none of the authority to change it — every action it wants to take goes through a human and then through the ordinary job queue.

what the AI doeswhat stays human

BRING YOUR OWN KEY

Your key, your bill, your data.

You configure a provider and a key. Talos never proxies your requests through us — there is no us in the request path, because the software is self-hosted. If you configure no provider, the engine is simply inert: nothing is contacted, and no part of your fleet is described to anybody.

The key itself is encrypted at rest with the same mechanism as your SSH keys and cloud credentials.

AnthropicOpenAIGoogleAzure OpenAIany OpenAI-compatible endpoint

PROPOSAL-GATED EXECUTION

The AI never touches your infrastructure.

It has no credentials, no SSH session and no side channel. What it produces is a proposal record. A person reads the diff, approves it, and the work is enqueued exactly as if that person had asked for it themselves — same permission check, same queue, same ledger entry.

01AI observesjobs, logs, inventory
02AI proposeswrites a proposal record
03A human reviews the diffthe step that cannot be skippedREQUIRED
04Normal job queuethe same path a person uses
05Audit ledgerattributed to the approver
proposal #318 · worker OOMKilled ×7 in 24hAWAITING REVIEW

The worker container has been OOM-killed seven times in the last day, each time within 90 seconds of a batch job starting. Its memory limit is 512M; peak observed usage before the kill is 780M. Proposed: raise the limit to 1G.

services:
worker:
- memory: 512M
+ memory: 1G
restart: always
ApproveRejectapproving runs it as you, under your permissions

WHAT IT DOES

Four jobs, all of them reviewable.

Diagnose and fix

Reads a failed job, its logs and what changed near it, then proposes the fix as a reviewable diff rather than a paragraph of advice.

Infrastructure builder

Describe what you want and get a plan you can read — the same gated path, never a direct apply.

Scheduled reports

Fleet summaries on a schedule: what changed, what failed, what is drifting, in the language you would use in a standup.

Read-only assistant

Ask questions about your own infrastructure without granting any write access at all. Most people start and stay here.

RETRIEVAL

It reads your fleet, not the internet.

A GENERIC CHATBOT HAS

no access to your job history
cannot see which host is failing
advice you must translate yourself

THE TALOS ENGINE RETRIEVES

server inventory, versions and kernels
job history, failures and retries
log excerpts around the failure window
change attribution — what moved, and when

Retrieval is scoped by the asking user’s permissions — it cannot surface a resource they could not open themselves.

PERMISSIONS

A proposal can never exceed the person who asked for it.

There is no service account with elevated rights behind the engine. Four separate checks apply, and all four are the same permission system the rest of Talos uses.

01

Visibility

The engine can only retrieve context the requesting user is already allowed to see.

02

Propose

Producing a proposal at all requires permission on the resource it targets.

03

Approve

A different person, who independently holds the permission, has to accept it.

04

Execute

Execution runs under the normal permission check, not under any elevated AI identity.

You pick the model per task

A scheduled report and an incident diagnosis do not need the same model. Configure them separately, see what each is spending, and change your mind without redeploying anything.

Why this is marked beta

The engine is complete and its gating is enforced in code, but it has not yet been run end-to-end against a live provider key in a production fleet. We would rather say that here than have you find out. Start it in read-only mode.

Point it at one server first.

Read-only mode grants it nothing. It can look, and it can tell you what it would do.

Install itSee how gates work →