LM Studio is a desktop application for finding, downloading and using open language models on your own computer. Users chat with local models, supply documents, and can make the models available to other software through a local server. The product runs on your own hardware; the maker also offers optional cloud services.
LM Studio is software from Element Labs, Inc., a company based in Delaware in the United States. The app is proprietary: under its terms of use the software remains the company's property, and the code is not public. The privacy policy states that, with local use, messages, chat history and documents do not leave the device. Limited data is processed for update checks and model searches, and the optional cloud services process requests transiently without retaining them, according to the vendor. The policy mentions transfers of data to the United States. For a European organisation, the content of conversations stays under its own control with local use, but the supplier is subject to US jurisdiction.