---
title: "What Locke is"
description: "Read the Sonomos Support Center guide for What Locke is. The one-minute version: what Locke does, who it's for, and how to read this guide."
url: "https://sonomos.ai/support/locke/what-it-is/"
source: "https://sonomos.ai/support/locke/what-it-is/"
---

Start here

# What Locke is

Locke sits between you and the AI tools you use, and quietly takes the private bits out of whatever you send them. It runs on your computer, it doesn't slow you down, and once it's on there's nothing you have to remember to do.

You paste a spreadsheet into ChatGPT to get help cleaning it up. It has customer emails in it. You ask Claude to summarize a patient note. It has a name and a date of birth in it. You hand Cursor a config file with a live API key in it. None of this is careless — it's just work. But once that text leaves your machine, it's on someone else's servers, and you can't take it back.

Locke is the step in between. When you send a message to an AI tool, Locke reads it first, spots anything sensitive, and swaps each sensitive value for a realistic stand-in before the message leaves your computer. The AI still understands the shape of what you're asking. It just never sees the real thing.

_The Locke desktop app on the Dashboard page, showing a green Protected status card, a compliance summary, three counters, and a live feed of masked detections._