Memory Belongs to the User: Portable Memory, an Open Standard Proposal for Cross-Vendor AI Memory

AI assistants became systems that remember: preferences, projects, relationships, and history now persist across sessions and increasingly shape what these systems do for us. That memory is the most personal dataset a person delegates to software — and today it is locked inside each vendor's proprietary storage, in incompatible shapes, with no way to move it and no way to prove it has ever been deleted. We believe this is the data portability gap of the AI era, and that it should be closed the way the web closed it for documents, mail, and calendars: with an open format. This paper proposes Portable Memory, an open, vendor-neutral standard for carrying AI memory across applications, devices, and vendors — lossless, local, and with verifiable deletion as its guarantee of integrity. We present the vision and principles; an overview of the format (a self-contained .mem bundle with a canonical, byte-reproducible serialization, portable deletion tombstones carrying proof-of-reach, and optional Ed25519 signing); and two open reference implementations (in Python and Swift) with proven byte-for-byte interoperability through a shared conformance fixture and a golden-vector suite, ingest adapters for mem0, ChatGPT, and Claude memory, a production integration, and a four-level conformance program gated on deletion propagation. We state plainly what this proposal is not yet — independently implemented, neutrally governed, widely adopted — and close with an explicit invitation: implement it, adopt it, challenge it, and help govern it.

Reference implementations are open source (MIT): Python and Swift. Community discussion is welcome at [email protected] or by opening an issue on either repository.

@misc{kryvoblotskyi-2026-portable-memory,
  author = {Sergii Kryvoblotskyi and Nataliia Stulova and Vladyslav Hamolia},
  title  = {Memory Belongs to the User: Portable Memory, an Open Standard Proposal for Cross-Vendor AI Memory},
  month  = {July},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Standards proposal — preprint for community review},
  url    = {https://research.macpaw.com/publications/portable-memory}
}