A file you give Nemi AI is staged, not uploaded

You attach a photo of a receipt and ask Nemi AI what the VAT was. You asked a question. You did not ask for the receipt to appear in your team's shared files, use up the workspace's storage and sit there for every colleague to scroll past. So in Nemi, a file you hand the assistant is not uploaded. It is staged.

Staged means three things. The file lives on your own account and in no workspace at all. It is kept for 24 hours and then deleted. And the only way it becomes an ordinary file is for you to say so, in words. This post goes through what happens to an attachment from the moment you press the paperclip, and, just as precisely, where the parts of it that leave Nemi go.

Is it safe to upload a file to an AI assistant?

It depends on where the file goes, who else can see it, and what happens to it afterwards, so here is each of those for Nemi AI. A file you attach is sent to our storage provider in Amsterdam, under your account, outside every workspace. Before anything can use it, it is scanned on our own servers by the same virus scanner every upload goes through; a file that fails is deleted before it is ever recorded. From then on the assistant can work with it for the rest of the day, and after 24 hours every request for it answers that it is gone. The clean-up runs every hour and deletes the bytes and the record together.

You can attach up to four files to a message, each up to 512 MB, with the paperclip, by dragging them onto the panel or by pasting a screenshot. Deleting your account deletes any that are still staged at once, without waiting for the day to run out.

Can my colleagues see what I attach?

No. There is nothing for them to see: a staged file is not in any workspace, so it is not in any file browser, any search, any activity list or any share. The same is true of the conversation itself. Your conversations with Nemi AI belong to your account, not to the workspace you had open, and the other members of that workspace cannot read them.

That is why the colleague panel above stays as it was for the whole day. It only changes if you ask for the file to be saved, and then it changes because you chose to put a file there, exactly as if you had uploaded it.

Does an attachment use my storage?

It does not count toward anybody's storage, yours or a workspace owner's. It does count toward your own monthly upload volume, on your own plan, because storing it for a day costs us the same as storing an upload, however soon it is deleted. That is a deliberate choice of whose allowance pays: yours, and never the owner of whichever workspace you happened to have open. A file the assistant makes for you from an attachment, such as a converted copy, does not count, because nobody sent it to us.

What happens when I ask it to convert or shrink the file?

“Make this smaller” is answered without the original going anywhere near your files, using the same conversion service as the rest of Nemi. The staged bytes go to our own conversion service, which runs on our infrastructure and keeps nothing once it has answered. The result is staged too, handed back to you as a download, and expires with everything else. Converting uses your own plan's conversion allowance, for the same reason the upload volume is yours: an attachment belongs to a person, not to a workspace.

How does an attachment end up in my workspace?

Only by you saying so. “Save this to my workspace” or “put this in the Invoices folder” copies it into your files, and from that moment it is an ordinary upload with every check an ordinary upload gets.

Those checks are not a formality. The saved file spends the workspace owner's storage, so it is held to the owner's plan, exactly like a file dropped into the browser. A vault folder is refused outright, because the assistant never touches a vault in either direction.

Nothing reaches a workspace unless you say the words.

Where is my attachment processed?

Two different places, and it matters which part goes where. Attaching a file sends its bytes to our storage provider in Amsterdam, our own scanner and our own conversion service, and no AI provider receives it because you attached it. A picture you ask the assistant to look at is the exception, and the steps below show what is sent. What goes to the language model is much less, and it goes through two other companies.

The model path, as our privacy policy states it in section 3.18: requests go to OpenRouter through its gateway in the EU, which passes them to Microsoft, which runs the model on Azure in the EU data zone. The request pins that zone and forbids routing anywhere else. At the EU gateway the request is decrypted inside the EU and may only be passed to hosts in the EU, and OpenRouter does not log the content there. Every request also carries an instruction that it may only be served by a host that does not retain what it is sent, and that it may not be used to train a model.

Which plans include Nemi AI?

Nemi AI is part of the Pro, Max and Business plans. Nothing about it happens unless you open the assistant and send it a message, and it acts with your permissions and nobody else's. More on what it can do is on the Nemi AI page, the plans are on pricing, and the help page on conversations and privacy covers deleting a conversation. Those conversations are stored encrypted at rest, which protects a copy of our database and not, as that post explains, the conversation from us. Every action the assistant takes is held to the same role check as your own, and if you would rather use an assistant you already have, the AI connection page shows how to connect it to your files.

The short version: an attachment is yours, it is temporary, nobody else sees it, and the model sees a description of it rather than the file, unless you ask it to look at a picture, which it then sees, scaled down first if it is large.