1. Sovereignty
Your data never leaves your space. The server is physically with you, or in a vault you designate. No copy held by us, no copy in the cloud, no copy in a third-party data centre.
Founding manifesto · Maison Aigyros
Cognitive heritage — the new class of intangible assets
"Some riches are owned. The most precious are passed down."
I — The assessment
A human life produces more thinking matter than any vault could ever contain. Decisions that altered careers. Intuitions that nourished lineages. Silences that protected families. Archives, voices, intimate writings, judgements carried across a century.
Yet when a person disappears, nearly all of this capital disappears with them. Platforms close accounts. Digital heirs are left with passwords and terms of service. Hard drives go dark. Recordings are lost. Private conversations — those that hold the most truth — evaporate.
There is a vault for the seeds of the world, in Svalbard. There are vaults for gold, for works of art, for legal documents. American services now offer to « plan your digital legacy » by asking for your passwords.
There was nothing for what is, at bottom, the only thing one can truly transmit: what one has thought, felt, understood, learned.
That is the void Maison Aigyros was created to fill. We call this matter cognitive heritage.
II — Canonical definition
Cognitive heritage denotes the full set of a person's mental, affective and experiential productions — living or departed — capable of being preserved, transmitted and reactivated by subsequent generations, under sovereign terms.
It includes, without limitation:
- Personal writings (correspondence, journals, notes, manuscripts)
- Recordings of voice, image and gesture
- Documented decisions and their reasoning
- Explicit values and ethical positions
- Know-how, professional intuition, family heuristics
- Relationships and networks of trust
It differs from intangible heritage as defined by the UNESCO Convention of 2003, which protects collective expressions of a community (song, dance, ritual, craft knowledge). Cognitive heritage operates at the scale of the person and the lineage. It is individual in its constitution, familial in its transmission, sovereign in its preservation.
We fully acknowledge the academic precedents of the term — Coopération, patrimoine cognitif et justice mondiale (Revue Éthique publique), Documenter le patrimoine cognitif (Calenda), the work of OpenEdition and HAL — and we add the dimension that was missing: the private casket, familial dignity, notarial transmission.
III — The seven pillars of Maison Aigyros
We are neither a startup, nor a cloud service, nor a resurrection platform. We are a house — in the sense of a publishing house, a fashion house, a private bank. And we hold to seven commitments that will admit no exception.
2. Air-gap
Once sealed, cognitive heritage is no longer connected to the internet. It becomes an object, in the sense that a painting or an ancient book is an object. What does not exist on the network cannot be hacked.
3. Consent
Nothing is integrated into the heritage without the author's explicit consent. Nothing is transmitted to an heir unless the author has chosen the conditions of transmission. Consent may be revised at any time, during one's lifetime.
4. Dignity
Cognitive heritage is not a spectacle. It will never be used to generate unauthorised post-mortem content, nor to produce a simulation of the departed person, nor to feed a public AI model. The person is not a data source: they are a source of meaning.
5. Notarial transmission
Cognitive heritage is integrated into the notarial deed of succession. The heir does not receive a password: they receive a deed. With the client's agreement, the notary becomes the legal trusted third party of transmission.
6. Centennial permanence
Formats are chosen to last a hundred years. Media are redundant. The method provides for periodic migration by a designated trusted third party. We think in generations, not quarters.
7. The ethics of refusal
There are things we will not do. We do not offer AI afterlife. We do not produce post-mortem deepfakes. We do not commercialise our clients' memory. We never surrender any data to any third party, in any form. We publish our full ethical charter and update it in step with technological advances — in alignment with CNIL work on the ethics of digital traces (issue 03/2026).
IV — The Aigyros method
Constituting cognitive heritage follows a five-step protocol, proven, documented, and adaptable to each situation.
Step 1 — Inventory
Together with the client, we map what already exists and what does not yet exist. Physical media, digital media, conversations to record, decisions to document, letters to write. The inventory itself is an act of transmission.
Step 2 — Digitisation
Physical media are digitised in high definition, with metadata, according to archival standards (ISAD(G), EAD). Formats are open, durable, non-proprietary.
Step 3 — Enrichment
The client records guided interviews: major decisions, turning points, acknowledged regrets, hopes for what follows. This is where the living matter of the heritage is constituted — that which no paper archive contains.
Step 4 — The casket
Everything is assembled in a local, hardened, encrypted, air-gapped server. An application allows consultation according to chosen permissions: read-only for grandchildren, full access for the designated heir, lock on certain documents until a given date.
Step 5 — Notarial transmission
The notary receives a sealed copy of the inventory and transmission conditions. Upon the constituent's passing, the protocol executes. The family does not discover a hard drive: they receive a heritage, with its instructions, its history, its reason for being.
V — Who we serve
Those who think of their existence in centuries rather than quarters. Business leaders who wish to transmit something other than a balance sheet. Artists whose work cannot be reduced to what is exhibited. Patriarchs and matriarchs of great families. Public figures whose voice will be heard after them. Residents of end-of-life care whose children realise, sometimes too late, that they never truly listened.
Our clientele is confidential. Our discretion is absolute. Our commitment has no term: Maison Aigyros accompanies its clients beyond the lifetime of its founders.
VI — Call for contribution
We do not claim to have invented a concept: we claim to have named what existed without a name, and to have given it the casket it deserved.
We call upon information scientists, archivists, notaries, family offices, historians of private life, and digital ethicists to join us in defining and protecting this new class of assets. Each year we will publish a report on the state of cognitive heritage in France, open to academic and professional contributions.
We call upon families who recognise themselves in this vision to write to us. We will receive them in full discretion.
Maison Aigyros — Monaco · French Riviera
contact@aigyros.com