TL;DR: Galaxy AI is hybrid, not local: lighter features process on-device, heavier generative ones use Samsung and partner clouds. Samsung does offer an on-device-only setting — flip it and cloud-dependent features stop working, which is the honest price of privacy. If what you actually want is fully local AI on a phone, that exists outside Samsung's stack: local models on Android, or a personal agent on your own hardware reachable from any phone via messaging apps.
The real answer: it depends on the feature
Samsung has been explicit that Galaxy AI mixes on-device and cloud processing. As a rule of thumb: quick, latency-sensitive transformations lean on-device; open-ended generative work leans cloud. The exact split shifts by device generation and update — which is precisely why the setting below exists.
The switch that matters
In Galaxy AI settings, Samsung provides an option to process data only on device. Enable it and you trade features for privacy: cloud-backed capabilities disable or degrade, and what remains runs locally. Two honest observations:
- The default is hybrid — privacy-maximal behavior is opt-in, not out of the box
- The setting is the ground truth for your phone: its description tells you which features survive on your specific device and software version
"Local" marketing vs. local architecture
The broader question behind this search is trust: whose hardware does your data touch? Vendor hybrid stacks give you a dial. Fully local setups give you an architecture: the model, the memory, and the processing all live on hardware you own, verifiable by turning off the network.
If you want actually-local AI on your phone
Two working paths beyond Galaxy AI:
- Run models on the phone itself — modern Android hardware handles small local models; our Android local AI guide covers tools and realistic expectations.
- Host your agent at home, reach it from the phone — a personal agent on your own PC, mini box, or Raspberry Pi, reachable through Telegram or WhatsApp. Your phone becomes a window; the intelligence and memory stay on your hardware. That is the OpenClaw pattern, and OneClaw is the no-DevOps way to run it.
The phone-vendor dial is convenient. Owning the whole stack is private by construction — choose based on which sentence you want to be true.