Survival LLM is a free, open source AI assistant and reference library that runs entirely on a local machine. Ask it how to keep food safe during a blackout, treat a burn, or purify water, and it answers from stored references and cites the articles it used, with the exact passage highlighted.

The library includes medical references, FEMA and CDC guidance, survival manuals, repair guides, and about 930,000 Wikipedia articles. The full download is 9 GB, or 19 GB once installed. A smaller version without Wikipedia and iFixit is 1.3 GB. Setup needs an internet connection and takes 20 minutes to about 2½ hours, mostly waiting on downloads. After that it works offline, with no account and no tracking.

When the app opens it checks available memory and downloads a model that fits, so more RAM means a larger model. Users can add their own PDFs, Word documents, ebooks and notes, such as a generator manual, and the assistant searches those too.…