Opal: Private Memory for Personal AI
Organizations: UC Berkeley · Google DeepMind
Abstract
Personal AI systems increasingly retain long-term memory of user activity, including documents, emails, messages, meetings, and ambient recordings. Trusted hardware can keep this data private, but struggles to scale with a growing datastore. This pushes the data to external storage, which exposes retrieval access patterns that leak private information to the application provider. Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is a cryptographic primitive that can hide these patterns, but it requires a fixed access budget, precluding the query-dependent traversals that agentic memory systems rely on for accuracy. We present Opal, a private memory system for personal AI. Our key insight is to decouple all data-dependent reasoning from the bulk of personal data, confining it to the trusted enclave. Untrusted disk then sees only fixed, oblivious memory accesses. This enclave-resident component uses a lightweight knowledge graph to capture personal context that semantic search alone misses and handles continuous ingestion by piggybacking reindexing and capacity management on every ORAM access. Evaluated on a comprehensive synthetic personal-data pipeline driven by stochastic communication models, Opal improves retrieval accuracy by 13 percentage points over semantic search and achieves 29x higher throughput with 15x lower infrastructure cost than a secure baseline. Opal is under consideration for deployment to millions of users at a major AI provider.
Figures & tables
| System | Tput. (ops/s) | Users/Encl. | Cost ($/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opal | 15.82 | 1,932 | 5.21M |
| In-Memory | 0.549 | 67.0 | 24.93M |
| Ratio | 28.8 | 28.8 | 15.0 / 4.79 |
Appendix figures & tables1 asset
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Research Finding | How Used |
|---|---|
| Mean reply rate of 45.6% across Enron email corpus ( Fox et al., 2016 ) | Email self-excitation set to 0.40, adjusted down from 0.45 for inbox noise absent in Enron and cross-modal budget reserved for meeting- and message-triggered emails |
| Reply time distribution: median 47 min, mean 1157 min ( Kooti et al., 2015 ) | Email triggering influence decays with 47-minute half-life |
| 50% of corporate emails contain no actionable task ( Sappelli et al., 2016 ) | 60% of emails treated as noise |
| 8.4% of institutional emails are organizational bulk emails ( de Castro, 2025 ) | 15% of noise emails are organizational bulk emails such as newsletters |
| 15% of Enron emails classified as gossip ( Mitra and Gilbert, 2013 ) | 25% of noise emails are gossip |
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