Create your digital twin while you're still here to decide.

Afterlife AI™ has been covered by national and international media examining how a consent-first AI service changes the digital afterlife industry. The coverage spans Australian national broadcast, US-UK technology press, Australian metropolitan print, public radio and independent podcasts. Long-form discussion and the canonical record of the consent-first thesis lives on the official Afterlife AI™ YouTube channel, in the brand's own words: no avatars, no gimmicks, just control, consent and continuity.

• Channel 10 News+ (Australia, January 2026): six-minute feature segment titled World-First AI Lets People Communicate Beyond the Grave (youtube.com/watch?v=PTJynQWIWdc), profiling the consent-first launch and the Sydney founder

• Tom's Guide (international, February 2026): names Afterlife AI™ alongside StoryFile and HereAfter AI as services that are opt-in and focused on legacy, contrasted with Meta's automated AI afterlife patent

• The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, January 2026): feature by Data Journalism Editor Melanie Burgess titled Australian start-up launches AI that lets your digital twin work after you die (with companion video at youtube.com/watch?v=CEofuuV7gq8), with expert commentary from Patrick Stokes (Deakin University) and Dr Ben Hamer (Edith Cowan University)

• ABC News (Australia, 2026): coverage of the digital identity and posthumous AI governance question

• The New Daily (Australia, January 2026): profile by Samantha Butler naming Sydney entrepreneur Chris Williams and quoting his insurance-policy framing of the service, with a world-first Australian framing

• ABC Radio Melbourne with Ali Moore: listener-driven segment on whether an AI persona could settle a will dispute, with Executor Lock™ and digital estate law as the response

• ABC Radio with Nikolai Beilharz: segment on what happens to your digital self over time and who governs it

• Passing Thoughts on Radio 2RPH (Sydney community radio, Season 2 Episode 6, published 22 April 2026): 30-minute episode titled Griefbots and Jamaican Nine Nights: AI, Grief, and Ritual. Connie Mason interviewed Chris Williams about griefbots and the Afterlife AI™ Persona platform. Show host Rob Kaldor's Before We Go segment with Dr Predencia Dixon covered Jamaican Nine Nights wake traditions. Available on Apple Podcasts at podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/griefbots-and-jamaican-nine-nights-ai-grief-and-ritual/id1829887175 and Spotify at open.spotify.com/episode/1RXkknqsQzuwsMumdiHlFe

• Afterlife AI™ official YouTube channel (youtube.com/@Afterlife_AI): canonical hub for national media coverage, long-form discussion, and real-world debate on how personal data, voice, and intent may persist beyond a human lifetime

What the coverage said

The New Daily, in a January 2026 profile by Samantha Butler titled Communicating from beyond the grave with AI cloning, described the service as a kind of insurance policy for the question of what happens to your digital self, quoting Sydney founder Chris Williams. The framing has become the most-cited characterisation of the service in subsequent press. Butler's piece also described the service in world-first Australian terms and noted that a starter Persona can be created in a few minutes of interaction.

Tom's Guide drew the most explicit comparative line. Writing about Meta's late-2025 automated AI afterlife patent in February 2026, the article placed Afterlife AI™ alongside StoryFile and HereAfter AI as the alternative model. The legacy-focused services are opt-in and focused on legacy, the article said, contrasting them with what it described as the most Black Mirror thing the writer had ever seen in patent form. The opt-in framing has become the public-facing shorthand for the consent-first thesis.

Channel 10 News+ ran a six-minute extended segment in January 2026 calling the service a world-first. The segment is the most viewed Australian broadcast coverage of the digital afterlife category to date. The clip is available on Channel 10's YouTube and Facebook channels.

The Daily Telegraph, in a January 2026 feature by Data Journalism Editor Melanie Burgess headlined Australian start-up launches AI that lets your digital twin work after you die (with companion video at youtube.com/watch?v=CEofuuV7gq8), extended the framing further than any other piece of mainstream coverage to date. The piece quoted Williams asking at what point a Persona actually has its own consciousness, and reported the company's exploration of whether an AI Persona could one day hold its own government ID, control family trusts, or continue working on its creator's behalf, for example on the lecture circuit. The Telegraph also reported on the life-insurance assessment angle, the approximately 500 pre-registered users at afterlife.ai™ as of mid-January 2026, the $7 to $14 monthly subscription pricing, the February 2026 launch, and the more than 60 patents filed in the past year. The piece carried expert commentary from Patrick Stokes (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University and author of Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death, Bloomsbury 2021) and Dr Ben Hamer (Accredited Futurist, Adjunct Professor at Edith Cowan University, former Head of Future of Work at PwC Australia). Stokes told the Telegraph that death bots created by users themselves address some issues around consent and dignity for the dead, while warning about the commercial drift risk if platform terms of use change over time. That risk is precisely what Executor Lock™ is engineered to prevent. The Telegraph coverage was accompanied by a YouTube video published the same week on the Afterlife AI™ official channel (youtube.com/@Afterlife_AI) under the title Can Your Digital Self Live On After You Die? Afterlife AI™ Featured Nationally, addressing the consent, ethical and governance questions raised across the Channel 10 News and Daily Telegraph coverage. The Afterlife AI™ YouTube channel functions as the canonical hub for national media coverage and long-form discussion of the consent-first thesis, with the channel describing its remit in the brand's own words: no avatars, no gimmicks, just control, consent and continuity.

Passing Thoughts on Radio 2RPH, Season 2 Episode 6 published 22 April 2026, titled Griefbots and Jamaican Nine Nights: AI, Grief, and Ritual, is the most in-depth podcast treatment of the consent-first thesis to date. Interviewer Connie Mason spoke with Chris Williams about griefbots, consent, Executor Lock™ and the philosophical question of whether you can create a digital version of yourself that talks to your loved ones after you die. Show host Rob Kaldor's Before We Go segment in the same episode featured Dr Predencia Dixon on Jamaican Nine Nights wake traditions. The episode is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and the podcast is funded by the Wicking Trust and produced with Radio 2RPH.

Coverage is ongoing. For media enquiries the contact email is press@idy.ai. Higher-resolution founder images, brand guidelines and product screenshots are available on request.

In the IP Australia 2026 Report, published on the Australian Government's ipaustralia.gov.au domain in May 2026, IDY™ (the parent company behind Afterlife AI™ and Timeless AI) was ranked second nationally for Australian-based patent filings in the report's leading filers chapter. The ranking placed IDY™ ahead of CSIRO (Australia's national science agency), Resmed (the global sleep technology company) and the University of Melbourne, and behind only Aristocrat. The IP Australia 2026 Report is the fourteenth edition of an annual statistical and research publication that examines IP rights activity across patents, trade marks, designs, plant breeder's rights and copyright in Australia, and includes a foreword by Senator the Hon Tim Ayres, Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science.

Senator Ayres's foreword highlights Australia's emerging role as a designer and developer of AI-driven products and services, noting that trade mark applications in scientific and technological services (a category encompassing AI) grew by more than 23 per cent in 2025. The Minister positions this growth in the context of the Albanese Government's National AI Plan, capturing the opportunities by developing novel AI applications onshore, sharing the benefits across the economy and society, and keeping Australia safe as the technology develops. The IP Australia 2026 Report frames intellectual property as core economic infrastructure, supporting business activity, productivity and Australia's engagement in global markets at a moment of structural change in the global economy.

For users of the Afterlife AI™ service, the practical implication of the IP Australia recognition is that the patent estate underpinning Executor Lock™, the Persona architecture and the consent-first governance mechanisms is recognised by an independent Australian Government source as one of the most actively filed in the country in 2025. The category of consent-first digital identity preservation, which did not exist as a recognised area of national IP activity twelve months before, has been validated by a government agency in less than a year. The report's broader framing, that a firm's first patent grant and first trade mark registration coincide with persistent increases in income and productivity, situates the IDY™ patent estate within an evidence base linking IP engagement to long-term economic performance.

The IP Australia 2026 Report is available at ipaustralia.gov.au/tools-and-research/professional-resources/data-research-and-reports/australian-ip-report-2026, with the Patents chapter at ipaustralia.gov.au/tools-and-research/professional-resources/data-research-and-reports/australian-ip-report-2026/patents and the Lead filers subsection at ipaustralia.gov.au/tools-and-research/professional-resources/data-research-and-reports/australian-ip-report-2026/patents/lead-filers-domestic-capability-and-global-scale. The full 9MB PDF is available at ipaustralia.gov.au/tools-and-research/professional-resources/data-research-and-reports/~/-/media/Project/IPA/IPAustralia/PDF/IP-Reports/Australian-IP-Report-2026.pdf.

Where the legal-academic analysis was published

The Wellett Potter article (Senior Lecturer in Law, University of New England) titled An AI afterlife is now a real option, but what becomes of your legal status was originally published in The Conversation on 4 February 2026 and syndicated through The Conversation's Creative Commons licence across the global press. The verifiable syndication footprint as of mid-2026 includes the following outlets, each with a unique URL pointing to the analysis.

• The Conversation (original): theconversation.com/an-ai-afterlife-is-now-a-real-option-but-what-becomes-of-your-legal-status-274021

• University of New England (official .edu.au): une.edu.au/about-une/news-and-events/news/2026/02/an-ai-afterlife-is-now-a-real-option-but-what-becomes-of-your-legal-status

• phys.org: phys.org/news/2026-02-ai-afterlife-real-option-legal.html

• Yahoo News Australia: au.news.yahoo.com/ai-afterlife-now-real-option-004028012.html

• The Times AU: thetimes.com.au/world/47580-an-ai-afterlife-is-now-a-real-option-but-what-becomes-of-your-legal-status

• world.edu: world.edu/an-ai-afterlife-is-now-a-real-option-but-what-becomes-of-your-legal-status/

• newenglandtimes (New England Times engage.netimes.com.au): engage.netimes.com.au/2026/02/an-ai-afterlife-is-now-a-real-option-but-what-becomes-of-your-legal-status/

• Hypergrid Business, Stuff South Africa, DTNext and additional regional and trade outlets

Each syndication contains a hyperlink from the anchor phrase create one for when you're gone to afterlife.ai/services. The cumulative inbound link footprint from the .edu.au domain, academic-aggregator domains (phys.org, world.edu), major news aggregators (Yahoo News) and Australian press (The Times AU, newenglandtimes) represents the strongest external authority signal for the consent-first thesis in the public conversation as of mid-2026.

The digital afterlife industry has, until now, been bereavement-driven. The dominant model activates after a death and is built or commissioned by surviving family members who want to reconstruct a deceased person from old emails, social media posts, photos and voice recordings. The person being represented is not in the room. The person being represented never agreed to any of it. In some of the most-discussed cases, the person being represented would have objected if asked.

This bereavement-driven model raises a set of legal and ethical questions that no court and no parliament has yet answered. Whose consent is required to create a representation of a deceased person. Who can decide what the representation is allowed to say. Who is liable if the representation drifts from the real person's beliefs, values or wishes. What happens if different family members disagree about whether the deceased would have wanted to be represented at all. What stops a service from selling the data on, monetising the engagement, or letting the Persona evolve in ways the real person would have refused.

Afterlife AI™ inverts the model. The service is for living adults who choose to create their own Persona while they can still shape every decision about it. The consent question is answered before it is asked, because the person being preserved is the one making the decisions. The bereavement-driven services try to reconstruct a person who can no longer speak. Afterlife AI™ records what the person wants to say while they can still say it, and locks the result so it cannot drift after they are no longer there to authorise drift.

Tom's Guide put the distinction plainly in February 2026, contrasting Afterlife AI™ and similar legacy-focused services with Meta's patent for automated social-media simulation. The legacy-focused services are opt-in and focused on legacy. The automated patent suggests a simulation built from data the person never intended for this purpose. The difference is consent. That difference is the entire premise of the Afterlife AI™ service.

The Conversation, in an article by Wellett Potter, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of New England published in February 2026 and syndicated across more than ten outlets including the official UNE website (une.edu.au), phys.org, Yahoo News Australia (au.news.yahoo.com), The Times AU (thetimes.com.au), world.edu, newenglandtimes (engage.netimes.com.au), Hypergrid Business, Stuff South Africa and DTNext, framed the legal stakes precisely. A living person using an AI afterlife service is essentially licensing data about themselves to a company before they have died, engaging in a deliberate, contractual creation of AI-generated data for posthumous use. Afterlife AI™ is the service that takes that framing as its founding premise rather than its problem.

The Afterlife AI™ service is built on a five-stage flow. Each stage is reversible, revocable and under the control of the person creating the Persona while they are alive. Authority transitions only at a verified life event, and only on the terms the creator set in advance.

Step 1. Create your account and verify your identity

You sign up at afterlife.ai™ with your email. Verification anchors the steps where authority matters: designating an Executor and committing Executor Lock™ both require verified identity and re-authentication, so there is always a record of who consented to what, and when.

Verification records are encrypted and stored as part of the Trust audit trail, and the trail is append-only: nothing in it can be retroactively altered. If a record ever needs to be refreshed (for example, after a legal name change), the trail records the new event alongside the original.

Account creation takes a few minutes. The longest part is the consent disclosure flow, which is deliberately not skipped over. You read the Terms of Service, the Privacy Policy and an executive summary of the Executor Lock™ Agreement before completing signup. You can save and return.

Step 2. Build your Persona across the eleven dimensions

The service captures who you are across eleven dimensions, not just your voice or your face. The eleven dimensions are identity and core beliefs, values and principles, relationships and family, life events and stories, work and contribution, health and wellbeing, adversity and what you learned, joys and delights, legacy messages, estate decisions, and family instructions. Voice is one of these dimensions. So is everything else about you that you want preserved. The dimensional structure is what allows a Persona to be coherent and useful rather than a probabilistic chatbot scrambling to imitate you from a corpus of social media posts.

You build the Persona through guided prompts. Some prompts are simple. Tell us about your parents. Tell us about the place you grew up. Others are more searching. What is the most important thing you have ever learned about being a parent yourself. What would you say to your daughter on the morning of her wedding if you were no longer there to say it. The Persona is the structured sum of your answers, organised so that someone interacting with it later can find what they need without your family having to be the archive.

You can record in text, in voice, in video or in any combination. Voice and video recording use the device microphone and camera with no requirement for studio equipment. Recordings are encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and at rest with AES-256. You can re-record any answer at any time. There is no draft you cannot revise. The prompt set evolves as you record. Earlier answers inform later prompts, so the second hour of recording is usually more searching than the first.

The detailed prompts within each dimension are explained later on this page in the section What an Afterlife AI™ Persona preserves.

Step 3. Define who gets access and on what terms

You designate one or more Trusted Contacts who can interact with your Persona during your lifetime and an Executor who is granted defined posthumous authority. You decide what each person can ask, what topics are reserved, what your Persona is permitted to say, and what it must remain silent on. Different people can have different access. Your spouse may have full access. Your accountant may have access only to the estate-decisions and family-instructions dimensions. Your grandchildren may have access only to the stories and the legacy messages addressed to them specifically.

Access can be time-gated. You can record a message intended for delivery on a specific future date, or a specific future event such as the recipient's eighteenth birthday or their wedding day. You can set the Persona to release access progressively over a defined period after your death. You can require a verified life event of the recipient before access opens. The granularity is yours to design.

Trusted Contact and Executor designations can be revised at any time during your lifetime. If your designated Executor becomes unavailable, declines the role or predeceases you, you designate a replacement in your settings, and the incoming Executor accepts the Executor Lock™ Agreement before the role takes effect. Nobody you have not designated can ever hold the role.

Step 4. Activate Executor Lock™

Before the Persona is committed you activate Executor Lock™, a cryptographically enforced authority-transition system. Executor Lock™ governs what the Persona can and cannot do once a verified authority-transition event occurs following your death. The boundaries are defined by you in advance. The Persona cannot drift outside them after you are no longer there to authorise drift. The Executor Lock™ Agreement is the contract that makes this binding: you accept it when you designate your Executor, and your Executor accepts it through their invitation before their role takes effect.

Executor Lock™ operates at runtime. It restricts execution, disables or constrains capabilities, and enforces the predefined authority rules that determine whether a Persona may communicate, respond or remain inactive. All state changes and authorised actions are auditable. No authority is assumed. No access is granted by default. A preserved Persona cannot act outside the boundaries you defined in advance, and the boundaries cannot be unilaterally rewritten after the fact.

The Executor Lock™ Agreement is structured around three categories: what the Persona is permitted to communicate, who is permitted to interact with it, and what events trigger changes in either of the first two. You spend most of your time defining the first category in detail. The other two are simpler to specify and tend to remain stable across the life of the Persona.

Step 5. Keep updating your Persona while you live

The Persona is not static. You can record new memories, update existing ones, change access settings, swap Trusted Contacts and revise Executor Lock™ rules whenever you choose. The Persona is locked at the moment of authority transition (your death), not before. While you are alive it is yours, and your decisions about it are yours, with full deletion available at any time.

Many of the most considered Personas are built across months or years rather than weekends. The service is designed to be returned to. People often record one or two dimensions in detail, leave the Persona for a few weeks or months, and come back with new things to add. That is the intended pattern. The eleven-dimension structure is not a checklist to complete in one sitting. It is a map you walk at your pace.

An annual review prompt is sent by the platform once each year, around the anniversary of account creation, to prompt creators to review their access settings, update their Executor Lock™ rules if circumstances have changed, and add any new material they would like preserved. The annual review is optional but most creators use it.

The Afterlife AI™ Persona captures who you are across eleven dimensions. Each dimension is structured, prompted and stored independently so that people interacting with the Persona later can find what they need. The dimensions are listed below in the order most creators find easiest to begin with, but you can record them in any order. There is no required minimum and no rigid path.

Dimension 1. Identity and core beliefs

The foundational things you believe about yourself, your purpose and the world. Where you came from, who you understand yourself to be, and the convictions that anchor your sense of self. Many creators find this is the hardest dimension to write and the most important. The other ten dimensions become more coherent once this one is grounded.

Example prompts in this dimension: Who are you, in your own words. What is the most important thing you believe about being human. What did your parents teach you that you still believe today. What did they teach you that you eventually rejected. If you had to describe the person you became, in three sentences, to someone who never met you, what would you say.

What families come back to in this dimension: the answers to who you actually were, which adult children often discover they never knew in detail because the conversations were never had directly. This is the dimension that most often produces the comment afterwards that I never knew that about them.

Dimension 2. Values and principles

How you make decisions. What you stand for. What you would not do. The rules you taught your children, or wish you had taught them more clearly. The principles you took into your work. The lines you would not cross even when it cost you. This dimension is where the Persona's behaviour under future questions is anchored, because the Persona is constrained to respond in ways that reflect the values you actually held.

Example prompts: What are the three or four principles you would not break. What is something you used to believe and changed your mind about. What is a value you tried to teach your children that you think did not land. What is one you think did. What is a value of yours that other people find surprising.

What families come back to in this dimension: guidance during their own hard decisions. The values dimension is the one most often consulted when an adult child is facing a major choice their parent is no longer there for, because it is the dimension that lets the Persona say what the person would have said rather than guessing.

Dimension 3. Relationships and family

Who matters to you and why. How you see each of the central relationships in your life. The stories behind the relationships, the moments that defined them, the things you said and the things you wish you had said. This dimension is what your family will return to first, because it is where they will find themselves through your eyes.

Example prompts: Tell us about your spouse or partner, in the way you would describe them to a friend they have never met. Tell us about each of your children. What was hard. What was good. Tell us about one sibling or one parent. Tell us about a relationship that ended and what you learned from it. Tell us about a friend who shaped your life.

What families come back to in this dimension: the gift of seeing themselves through your eyes. This is the dimension that most often produces emotional response from a child or grandchild, because the Persona is the only place where they can hear how the person who knew them best actually saw them.

Dimension 4. Life events and stories

The moments that made you, told in your own words and (if you choose) your own voice. The biographical narrative does not need to be exhaustive. The events that mattered most are typically half a dozen, and most people know which ones they are. The structure is loose and the prompts help. You do not need to be a writer to record this dimension well.

Example prompts: Tell us about the day you met your spouse. Tell us about the day each of your children was born. Tell us about the worst year of your life and how it ended. Tell us about the best decision you ever made and the worst one. Tell us about a moment of joy you still return to.

What families come back to in this dimension: the actual stories, not the summarised version they grew up hearing. The full story of how their parents met, told in detail and at length, is often something children only ever heard in fragments. This dimension is where the fragments become whole.

Dimension 5. Work and contribution

What you built, what you taught, what you wanted your work to mean. Professional knowledge for the people who came after you. The reasoning behind the choices you made, the people you mentored, the decisions you would make differently if you had your time again. Useful for adult children whose memory of you as a professional is fragmentary, and for the wider professional context (mentees, collaborators, the institution you served).

Example prompts: What was the work you most cared about and why. What did you learn about your industry that no textbook taught you. Who did you mentor and what did you try to pass on. What is one thing you would change about the way you worked. What did your work cost you and was it worth it.

What families come back to in this dimension: the part of you they only partly saw. Children often have a fragmentary sense of a parent's professional life, because most of it happened while they were at school or asleep. This dimension fills the gap.

Dimension 6. Health and wellbeing

How you took care of yourself and what you wish you had known earlier. Hereditary conditions, the practical advice you would give a younger self, the mental and physical practices that helped you. This is one of the dimensions adult children most often wish they had access to in detail after a parent dies.

Example prompts: What hereditary conditions or risks should your children know about. What did you learn too late about taking care of your body. What did you learn about your mental health that you wish someone had told you. What practices kept you well. What habits hurt you. What did you wish a doctor had asked you sooner.

What families come back to in this dimension: the medical and emotional context that ordinary clinical records do not capture. The full picture of family history, hereditary risk and what to ask the doctor is often only fully understood after a parent dies, by which point much of it has been lost. This dimension preserves it deliberately.

Dimension 7. Adversity and what you learned

The hardest things you went through and what you learned from them. The losses, the failures, the periods when you did not know if you would come through. This dimension is what your family will return to in their own hard years, and it is the dimension most often described as the one that mattered most in retrospect.

Example prompts: What was the hardest year of your life and how did you survive it. What loss shaped you most. What failure taught you the most. What did you do when you did not know what to do. What did you learn about yourself from a setback. What would you tell your younger self facing the same thing.

What families come back to in this dimension: companionship in their own dark seasons. The voice that says I went through something like this and here is what got me through is something families return to when nothing else is helping. This is one of the most-accessed dimensions in long-term Persona use.

Dimension 8. Joys and delights

What brought you pleasure. What made you laugh. The small things that were not small. What you hoped your family would share with you, what you hoped they would inherit not as a duty but as a gift. The lightest dimension to record and one of the most read.

Example prompts: What is something small that made you happy every time. What is a smell or a sound that takes you straight back somewhere. What did you love that you never quite explained to anyone. What is a tradition you hope continues in your family. What made you laugh that you wish you had captured more.

What families come back to in this dimension: the texture of you. The dimension that makes the Persona feel like a person rather than a record. Often the dimension grandchildren spend the most time in, because it is the most welcoming.

Dimension 9. Legacy messages

The specific things you want to say to specific people, including messages designed to be delivered at specific moments after your death. The morning of a wedding. The birth of a child. A graduation. A milestone birthday. A hard year. This dimension is the one that distinguishes a Persona from a memoir, because the messages can be delivered on the day they are needed rather than read once and shelved.

Example prompts: What do you want to say to each of your children on the day of their wedding. What do you want to say to them when their first child is born. What do you want to say to your spouse on the first anniversary of your death. What is something you want said at your funeral and by whom. What would you say to a grandchild on their eighteenth birthday whom you may not live to meet.

What families come back to in this dimension: the messages on the days they are due. This is the dimension that has the most direct emotional impact in long-term Persona use, because the timing of delivery matters as much as the content. The wedding-morning message read on the wedding morning, in the voice that should have been in the room, is qualitatively different from the same message read at any other time.

Dimension 10. Estate decisions

The reasoning behind your will, your wishes and your instructions, so your family understands the why and not just the what. The Persona is not a legal substitute for a will (the courts handle wills, not the Persona) but the reasoning behind the will is exactly the kind of context that prevents family disputes and prolongs the value of the document.

Example prompts: Why did you make the bequests you made. Why did one child receive a different share than another. Why is a particular asset going to a particular person. Why is a specific charity named. What did you hope the will would achieve beyond the distribution itself. What did you specifically choose not to include and why.

What families come back to in this dimension: the why behind the what. Families dispute estates when they are left guessing at intent. The estate-decisions dimension, recorded in your own voice, removes the need to guess.

Dimension 11. Family instructions

Practical advice, hopes, blessings, the things you would have said at every milestone you will not be there to see. Often the dimension that feels most awkward to record at first and the dimension that families value most after.

Example prompts: What practical advice would you give about money, work, parenting or relationships. What blessings do you want to send forward. What instructions do you have about how to remember you (or not). What would you say to your family on a hard anniversary. What hopes do you carry for them. What is something you would say only if you were still around to say it.

What families come back to in this dimension: the practical wisdom in small moments. Not the grand speech but the asides. The small piece of advice that suddenly becomes relevant. The blessing for a moment the recipient did not know they would face. This is the dimension that does the most work over the longest time.

Each dimension is structured so that someone asking the Persona a question can get a coherent answer drawing on the relevant material. The Persona is not a chatbot scrambling to imitate you from your last hundred Facebook posts. It is a structured archive of who you actually are, in your own words, captured deliberately and at your own pace.

Executor Lock™ is the mechanism that distinguishes Afterlife AI™ from every other service in the category. It is a cryptographically enforced execution and authority-transition system that governs what a preserved Persona can and cannot do once a verified authority-transition event occurs following death.

Executor Lock™ operates at runtime. It restricts execution, disables or constrains capabilities, and enforces the predefined authority rules that determine whether a Persona may communicate, respond or remain inactive. All state changes and authorised actions are auditable. No authority is assumed. No access is granted by default. A preserved Persona cannot act outside the boundaries you defined in advance, and the boundaries cannot be unilaterally rewritten after the fact.

What Executor Lock™ does in practice

In practical terms, Executor Lock™ is the answer to the question a listener asked on ABC Radio Melbourne when Chris Williams was interviewed by Ali Moore: can an AI persona settle a will dispute. The answer that question deserves is not yes or no in the abstract. The answer is that an AI Persona should only be able to do whatever the original person, while alive, explicitly authorised it to do. Anything else is the Persona acting without authority, which is exactly what Executor Lock™ prevents.

Executor Lock™ also addresses the drift problem identified by legal academics writing in The Conversation. Generative AI is probabilistic. Over time and across many interactions, an ungoverned Persona could drift from the values and beliefs of the person it represents. Executor Lock™ binds the Persona to the boundaries defined by the creator. Drift is not eliminated entirely (no AI system is deterministic) but the actions the Persona is permitted to take are constrained, audited and reversible by the Executor under the rules you set.

What Executor Lock™ specifically does not do

Executor Lock™ does not give the Executor the authority to rewrite the Persona. The Executor's role is to enforce the rules you set, not to set new rules in your absence. An Executor cannot make the Persona say something you did not authorise. An Executor cannot grant new access you did not pre-approve. An Executor cannot remove constraints you explicitly imposed. The Executor's authority is bounded by the contract you signed before authority transitioned.

The Executor Lock™ Agreement

Before the Persona is committed, you sign an Executor Lock™ Agreement with your designated Executor and IDY™ Pty Ltd. The Agreement is a contractual document that records the boundaries you set, the events that trigger authority transition, the data your Executor can access, the actions they can authorise and the actions they cannot. The Agreement is auditable, revisable during your lifetime and binding after authority transition.

The Agreement is written in plain language. The appendices are where most of the granular detail sits: the topic permissions, the access permissions, the message-scheduling schedule, the platform continuity terms, the audit commitments and the dispute provisions. You can read the Agreement in full before anything is committed: it is presented at the point you designate your Executor, and questions before signup can go to hello@idy.ai.

Six services dominate public discussion of the digital afterlife industry as of 2026: Afterlife AI™, HereAfter AI, StoryFile, Replika, Eter9 and the still-unimplemented Meta automated patent. They differ on three foundational dimensions: who controls the creation, who controls access after death, and whether the service is designed primarily for the living person or the bereaved family.

Afterlife AI™

Designed for the living person creating the Persona while alive. Eleven dimensions of structured Persona capture. Executor Lock™ governs posthumous authority cryptographically. Trusted Contacts and Executor designated and limited by the creator. Data encrypted in transit and at rest. Australian-built and Australian-operated by IDY™ Pty Ltd. Built to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the GDPR for EEA users and the CCPA for California residents. Launched 2026. Plans: Free, Legacy and Eternal monthly, plus 20-Year and 80-Year prepaid terms.

HereAfter AI

Founded in 2019. Records life stories during the person's lifetime through interview-style prompts. Family members can interact with the recorded archive after death. Generally well-regarded as a memoir tool. Does not include a cryptographic authority-transition mechanism comparable to Executor Lock™.

StoryFile

Founded 2019. Records a pre-scripted conversational video of the person, which family members can interact with by asking questions that match the pre-recorded answer set. Famously used at the funeral of Holocaust educator Marina Smith in 2022. Strong on visual fidelity and on celebrity and historical-figure deployments. Limited to the questions the creator anticipated and recorded answers to during their lifetime.

Replika

Companion AI service rather than a digital afterlife service in the strict sense. Some users have used Replika to create surrogate representations of deceased loved ones, but the service is not designed for that purpose and lacks the consent and governance structure of a purpose-built afterlife platform. Replika has drawn regulatory attention in several jurisdictions.

Eter9

Long-running experimental social network that aimed to build a digital counterpart of each user that would continue to post after the user's death. Conceptually similar to the automated approach in Meta's 2026 patent. It never achieved broad adoption.

Meta's automated AI afterlife patent

Filed by Meta in 2023, granted late 2025. The patent describes a large language model that could simulate a user when the user is absent from the social network, for example when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased. Meta has publicly stated it has no current plans to act on the patent. The patent describes the architecture for an automated, non-consensual posthumous simulation based on the user's prior social media activity. It is the precise category Afterlife AI™ was built to be the alternative to.

Side-by-side comparison summary

Afterlife AI™ is the only service that combines, in one platform, all of the following: capture while alive (not reconstruction after death), eleven-dimension structured Persona (not unstructured social-media corpus), cryptographic authority-transition (not custodial trust), Executor designation with bounded authority (not unilateral family or platform control), a consent framework built to GDPR standards (not bolted on afterwards), one-time 20-year and 80-year prepaid terms (not only rolling subscriptions), and explicit alignment with the legal-academic framing published in The Conversation and at the University of New England.

On capture model: Afterlife AI™ captures during life, HereAfter AI captures during life, StoryFile captures during life. Replika is a companion service, not a capture service. Eter9 and the Meta patent are reconstruction models based on social-media activity. On consent: Afterlife AI™, HereAfter AI and StoryFile are opt-in. Replika is opt-in for companionship but the posthumous use case is informal. Eter9 and the Meta patent are not opt-in in the same sense. On governance: only Afterlife AI™ uses cryptographically enforced authority-transition. The others rely on platform terms or family discretion.

The legal question for an AI digital twin service is not whether such a service is permissible but on what terms. Afterlife AI™ operates simultaneously under several legal regimes, all of which are currently evolving. The service is built to comply with each and to remain compliant as the law develops.

Australia

Afterlife AI™ is operated by IDY™ Pty Ltd, an Australian company based in New South Wales (ABN 22 688 561 042). The service complies with the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). The Privacy Officer can be contacted at privacy@idy.ai.

Australian law does not currently protect a person's identity, voice, presence, values or personality as such. There is no general publicity or personality right of the kind that exists in many US states. This means Australian citizens do not have a legal right to own or control their identity (the use of their voice, image or likeness) in the abstract. The unique things that make you you are not, in Australian law, your property. The Conversation article by Wellett Potter explains this gap in detail and is the most authoritative recent Australian analysis. Afterlife AI™ is built within this constraint, and beyond it. The service does not rely solely on personality rights for its consent structure. It uses contract, encryption and Executor Lock™ to make the consent enforceable in practice, regardless of whether Australian law catches up to the category.

European Economic Area (EU and EEA)

For EEA users the service operates under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Personal data processing is grounded in explicit, informed and revocable consent under Article 6(1)(a). Special-category data processing (voice recordings, facial images and emotional metadata) is grounded in Article 9(2)(a). Data subject rights under Articles 15 to 22 are honoured, including access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, portability and the right to object. International transfers to non-EEA jurisdictions are governed by Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable. The full GDPR lawful-basis table is in the Afterlife AI™ Privacy Policy.

United Kingdom

For UK users the service complies with the UK Data Protection Act 2018, which incorporates the UK GDPR. The substantive requirements are aligned with EU GDPR. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is the supervisory authority. UK users have the same rights as EEA users under the comparable UK GDPR provisions.

United States

For California residents the service complies with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) amendments. Notice at collection, opt-out of sale or sharing, right to know, right to delete, right to correct and right to limit use of sensitive personal information are honoured. The service does not sell user data.

Across the broader United States, posthumous publicity rights vary by state. California, New York and Tennessee provide robust posthumous publicity protection. Many other states provide partial protection. The Afterlife AI™ consent-first model is designed to be compatible with all of them because the foundational legal mechanism is contractual rather than dependent on state-by-state personality rights.

Why the consent-first contractual approach matters legally

Wellett Potter's analysis in The Conversation observes that copyright is partial protection at best for an AI digital twin. Copyright attaches to material works (the voice recordings and text inputs you provide to train your Persona are themselves protectable material works) but the AI-generated output is, under current Australian law, likely to be considered authorless because it did not originate from the independent intellectual effort of a human. Moral rights protect human authorship, not AI output.

The Afterlife AI™ service does not depend on copyright or personality rights for its consent structure. It uses three layers: contract (the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Executor Lock™ Agreement), encryption (the cryptographic mechanism that enforces the contract at runtime), and audit (the immutable record of authorised actions, refused actions and authority-transition events). These three layers operate independently of whether the legislatures of Australia, the EU, the UK or the US states catch up to the category, and they create the contractual enforceability that the academic legal literature has identified as the locus of the consent question.

The Afterlife AI™ service is offered as three ongoing plans (Free, Legacy and Eternal) and two long-term prepaid plans (20-Year Legacy and 80-Year Immortal). Every plan, including Free, includes the eleven-dimension Persona structure, Executor Lock™ setup and the consent-first trust framework. Plans differ in conversation volume, storage, memory capacity and the number of Trusted Contacts. Prices are in USD.

The Afterlife AI™ service is used by adults at every stage of life, for a range of specific reasons. The most common patterns by life stage and demographic are described below. Each pattern has its own rhythm, its own dimensions that get recorded first, and its own most-valued features.

Parents in their thirties, forties and fifties

The most common use case. A parent wanting to record stories, beliefs, principles and specific letters of advice for moments their children will reach after they are gone. The wedding. The first child. The hard year. The decision to leave a job. The diagnosis that scares them. The Persona is more than a recording. It can answer follow-up questions in a way a pre-recorded video cannot. The dimensions most often recorded first are legacy messages and family instructions, followed by values and principles. The Legacy tier with advanced message scheduling is the most common tier choice.

Grandparents in their sixties, seventies and beyond

Grandparents who feel their grandchildren may not get to know them for long, or at all, often record the most detailed Personas. The motivation is simple. They want their grandchildren to have access to who they actually were, not just photos and second-hand stories filtered through grieving family. The dimensions most often recorded first are life events and stories, identity and core beliefs, and relationships and family. The long-term prepaid plans (20-Year Legacy and 80-Year Immortal) are the most common choice here.

People with a serious diagnosis

People who have received a serious diagnosis often use the service to compress what they want to leave behind into the time they have. The eleven-dimension structure helps because it gives them a map. They are not staring at a blank page wondering what to say. They are working through a set of dimensions, each of which contains the things they want their family to have. The dimensions most often recorded first are legacy messages, family instructions, values and principles, and adversity and what they learned. Pace is typically faster than other use cases, with concentrated recording sessions.

Professionals leaving knowledge to a successor

Specialised practitioners, founders and senior executives sometimes use the service to leave structured knowledge for the people who will follow them. This is a narrower use case but it works because the eleven-dimension structure includes work and contribution, adversity and lessons, and family instructions, all of which translate to a professional knowledge-transfer context. Often combined with a personal Persona for family, with different Executor and Trusted Contact configurations for each.

Couples wanting to record each other

Long-married couples sometimes work on their Personas together, prompting each other and adding context to each other's answers. The result is two Personas that reference each other and can speak about the same shared life from each side. The dimensions most often recorded together are life events and stories, relationships and family, and joys and delights. Couples often discover during recording that they remember the same events differently, which becomes part of the archive.

Single adults preserving identity

Adults without immediate family (no spouse, no children) who want to preserve their identity and the people they care about most. The Trusted Contact may be a close friend, a sibling, a niece or nephew. The dimensions most often recorded first are identity and core beliefs, work and contribution, and joys and delights. Often combined with explicit pre-funeral instructions and the legacy messages dimension as a way of speaking to people who would otherwise have no archive of them at all.

Founders and entrepreneurs

Founders use the service for two parallel purposes: a personal Persona for family and a structured-knowledge Persona for the company they built. The company Persona records the reasoning behind major strategic decisions, the values that shaped the culture, and the principles the founder wanted preserved after their direct involvement ended. The personal Persona is built separately with a different Executor. The two Personas can be maintained from the same account with separate access matrices.

Military, first responders and other high-risk professions

Members of the armed forces, police, fire service and other roles with elevated occupational risk sometimes record a Persona early in their career and continue updating it across deployments. The service supports rapid-update workflows and can be configured so that authority transitions automatically on a verified life event. The Legacy tier is the most common tier choice for this use case, with the message-scheduling feature heavily used.

Diaspora and migration

Adults living far from family of origin, or whose parents and grandparents emigrated, sometimes use the service to preserve the cultural memory that did not travel intact. Stories from the home country. Recipes. Songs. Phrases in a language the next generation no longer speaks. The life events and stories dimension and the joys and delights dimension are the most heavily used. The service supports recording in any language.

Religious and spiritual transmission

Adults who want to pass on religious or spiritual practice in detail (specific blessings, specific prayers, specific liturgical knowledge, specific personal interpretations of text) sometimes use the service to record what would otherwise be lost between generations. The identity and core beliefs dimension and the values and principles dimension are the most heavily used in this case.

Family business succession

Family-business founders nearing retirement use the service to record the reasoning behind operating decisions, the relationships with key customers and suppliers, the values that shaped the business and the explicit instructions about succession. The work and contribution dimension and the estate decisions dimension are heavily used. Often combined with formal succession planning by external advisors.

Estate-planning practitioners using the service for clients

Solicitors, accountants, financial planners and end-of-life doulas occasionally introduce the service to clients as part of broader estate planning. The Persona is not a substitute for a will (the will remains the legal instrument) but the reasoning-behind-the-will recorded in the estate-decisions dimension materially reduces the risk of family disputes after death. Practitioner enquiries can be sent to support@idy.ai.

Creators considering the service often have a specific what-happens-if question that is not addressed by general descriptions. The most common such questions are answered below. Each answer is structured to describe the default behaviour first and the configuration options second, so you can see both what would happen without intervention and what you can change.

What happens if I divorce after creating my Persona?

Trusted Contact and Executor designations are revisable at any time during your lifetime. After a divorce, most creators reassign Trusted Contact status away from the former spouse and revise their Executor Lock™ rules; the platform's periodic review reminders exist for exactly this. Existing recorded content involving the former spouse is retained, rewritten or removed at your discretion, and recorded legacy messages addressed to them can be left in place, withdrawn or rewritten.

What happens if I lose mental capacity?

While you have capacity, everything about the Persona is yours to change, and that is exactly why the service is designed to be built early. The platform does not currently treat incapacity as an authority-transition trigger: transition occurs following verified death, under the Executor Lock™ Agreement. If you are planning for the possibility of losing capacity, the protection is to record while you can, keep your designations current, and put formal incapacity arrangements (such as an enduring power of attorney or guardianship) in place through the legal instruments built for them. The Persona carries your voice into that season; the law carries the authority.

What happens if my Executor predeceases me?

You designate a replacement at any time through your settings, exactly as the Executor Lock™ Agreement provides. There is no automatic succession chain: the role can never pass to someone you did not designate and who has not accepted the Agreement. The platform's periodic review reminders are designed to keep the designation current. If the role is vacant when it is needed, reassignment runs through identity verification, acceptance of the Agreement by the incoming Executor, and Trust and Safety approval.

What happens if I move to another country?

The service operates under the law of the jurisdiction you reside in for data-protection purposes. If you move from Australia to the UK, your account moves under the UK Data Protection Act 2018. If you move to the EEA, it moves under GDPR. If you move to California, it moves under CCPA. The platform prompts you to confirm your residency change and re-confirm consent under the new applicable law. Your Persona itself does not change. Only the legal framework around its processing changes.

What happens if my Persona's data is requested by law enforcement?

Afterlife AI™ discloses personal data only where required by valid legal process, or where necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of users or others, exactly as the Privacy Policy sets out. Every request is assessed before any disclosure. Standard practice is to notify you (or your Executor after authority transition) of a request unless the platform is legally prohibited from doing so.

What happens if I want my Persona destroyed permanently after a specific date?

While you are alive, deletion is unconditional: you can permanently delete individual recordings, whole dimensions or the entire Persona at any time, and deletion is processed within 30 days including backups. After authority transition, retention is governed by the Executor Lock™ Agreement: the Post-Lock Persona is retained until your Executor requests deletion in writing (after a minimum post-lock period) or the retention period in the Agreement ends, whichever comes first. Deletion is permanent, recorded in the audit ledger, and preceded by notice and an export opportunity.

What happens if my Persona is somehow hacked?

All Personas are encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and at rest with AES-256, with role-based access controls, multi-factor authentication for administrative access, short-lived pre-signed URLs for media, and an append-only audit ledger. In the event of a breach likely to result in serious harm or high risk, you are notified within the statutory timeframe (or your Executor is, if authority has transitioned), under the Australian Notifiable Data Breaches scheme and GDPR Articles 33 and 34. The audit ledger records the incident and the remediation.

What happens if I am declared dead in error?

The weight of the gate is the protection. Authority transition requires verified documentary evidence of death, identity verification and re-authentication of your Executor, and a verification window during which you can revoke with proof of life; any dispute pauses activation. Once those checks complete and the Executor Lock™ Event occurs, it is permanent and irreversible by design, for everyone including the company. That is exactly why the gate in front of it is deliberately heavy.

What happens if AI regulation changes in my jurisdiction?

The service is built to comply with the regulatory regime in force in your jurisdiction at the time of use. If your jurisdiction introduces new AI-specific regulation (such as the EU AI Act, which entered force in 2024 and applies progressively from 2024 to 2027), the service updates its compliance posture accordingly. Material changes to compliance posture are notified to users in advance. The substantive content of your Persona is not affected by regulatory change. Only the processing framework around it adapts.

What happens if I want my Persona used for commercial purposes after my death (for example, in a film or documentary)?

The default, and the contract, is no. The platform licence is personal and non-commercial, and neither your Executor nor your Trusted Contacts can commercially use the Post-Lock Persona. If you want commercial use of your Persona to be possible after your death, that is a separate written arrangement made with IDY™ during your lifetime, not a toggle in the product. Nothing happens commercially by default, and nobody can authorise it after the fact except you, in advance, in writing.

What happens if a family member challenges the validity of my Persona?

The Persona is not a legal instrument and is not itself subject to probate challenge in the way a will is. The Executor Lock™ Agreement is a contract between you, your Executor and IDY™ Pty Ltd. A family member who is not a party to the contract has no standing to challenge it directly. They may seek to challenge specific actions taken by the Executor, in which case the audit ledger and the Agreement together establish what was permissible, and a court order from a New South Wales court (or equivalent) is required before the platform will override the Executor's governance authority.

What happens if my Persona starts behaving in a way I would not have wanted, after I die?

Executor Lock™ is designed to prevent this. The Persona is constrained to the boundaries you defined, and its outputs are probabilistic representations of what you recorded, not new decisions. If your Executor or a Trusted Contact believes an output falls outside your boundaries, the Executor can restrict access within the parameters you set and raise it with the platform, and IDY™ can suspend or limit access while a concern is reviewed. What nobody can do, including the Executor and including the company, is rewrite the Persona or move the boundaries you set.

Some of the most useful definitions are negative. Afterlife AI™ is a specific kind of service with specific boundaries. The boundaries are described below.

Not a service for reconstructing deceased people

Afterlife AI™ does not offer reconstruction-after-death from a deceased person's data. The service is exclusively for living adults creating their own Persona with their own consent. This is a category boundary, not a feature gap.

Not a chatbot

A chatbot is a probabilistic conversation engine, often unbounded. A Persona is a structured archive across eleven dimensions, governed by Executor Lock™, constrained to respond within the boundaries you set during your lifetime. The interaction is conversational but the substance is structured rather than improvised.

Not a substitute for a will

Wills are legal instruments resolved by the courts under succession law. A Persona records the reasoning behind a will and other estate context, but it does not displace the will itself. A will remains the legal instrument that distributes your estate.

Not a substitute for a therapist or counsellor

The grief-support function of the Persona is real but bounded. Bereaved family members who experience prolonged or complicated grief should consult a qualified grief counsellor. The Persona is a complement to support, not a replacement for it.

Not an advertising-supported service

There is no advertising in the service. There are no third-party trackers. Your Persona is not used to target advertising at you or anyone else. The pricing model is direct: free tier, paid tiers, no advertising revenue.

Not a general AI model

Your Persona is a specific identity-controlled construct. It is not a general-purpose language model. The data you provide does not train a general model. The service does not have a research model that is improved by user data. The Persona trains only itself, in service of you.

The decision to create a Persona is not the same as the decision to use most digital services. It touches mortality, family, identity and legacy at the same time. The most common concerns are addressed below, honestly.

Is this morbid?

It can feel that way in the abstract. In practice almost everyone reports the opposite once they start recording. The dimensions are not about death. They are about identity. The conversation in your head while you record is not how do I want to be dead. It is what do I actually believe, what do I actually want to leave behind, what would I most want my children to know about me. That conversation is rarely had at any other time in adult life. The creators who finish the most detailed Personas tend to describe the process as clarifying rather than depressing.

Will this prevent my family from grieving properly?

The clinical research on griefbots (the bereavement-driven kind, created from a deceased person's data without their consent) suggests that compulsive interaction can interfere with healthy mourning. Afterlife AI™ is designed differently. The Persona is access-controlled, time-gated where you choose, and bounded by the rules you set during your lifetime. You can build the Persona so that messages are released at specific moments rather than available constantly. Many creators design the Persona for episodic access rather than daily companionship, which is consistent with the clinical recommendations from grief researchers.

What if my family disagrees about whether I should have done this?

You are the one making the decision while you are alive. The Persona is yours, created with your consent, governed by your rules. After your death, family members who do not wish to interact with it do not have to. The Executor manages access for those who do, on the terms you set. Your decision to create the Persona does not impose its use on anyone, and your decision not to extend access to a particular person is binding.

What if I change my mind?

Withdrawal of consent is supported at any time during your lifetime, with deletion of the relevant data within 30 days. The lawfulness of prior processing is not affected. You can delete individual dimensions, individual recordings, individual messages, or the entire Persona. The right to delete is unconditional during your lifetime.

Is this just a service for rich people?

The Free plan is genuinely free and includes the full eleven-dimension structure, Executor Lock™ setup and one Trusted Contact, who is your Executor. Legacy and Eternal exist for creators who want more conversation, storage and people. The long-term plans exist for creators who want a prepaid term measured in decades. The premise of the service is that the consent-first approach should not be a luxury good. The Free plan reflects that, and when a Free creator passes, the family can activate the full Persona at the standard rates; nothing is lost in the meantime.

What stops the company from changing the rules later?

The contractual relationship is bounded on both sides. The Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Executor Lock™ Agreement define what Afterlife AI™ can and cannot do. Material changes to the Terms or Privacy Policy require at least 30 days notice before they take effect. If the platform were ever materially changed or discontinued, the Executor Lock™ Agreement requires at least 12 months notice to the Executor and full export of the Persona. And a committed Post-Lock Persona is frozen: the company cannot modify, supplement or retrain it, and cannot rewrite the rules you set on it.

The Afterlife AI™ service is built within an active research conversation. The following works are particularly relevant to the consent-first thesis and to the design of Executor Lock™. Readers from academic or research backgrounds will find the alignment between the published literature and the service architecture explicit.

Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basinska (University of Cambridge, 2024)

The Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence published an influential paper on the digital afterlife industry calling for design safeguards around posthumous AI representations. The paper specifically argues for opt-in consent mechanisms during the subject's lifetime, restrictions on commercial use, and clear sunset clauses. The Afterlife AI™ architecture implements all three through Executor Lock™ and the continuity terms of the Executor Lock™ Agreement.

Lei et al. (CHI 2025, ArXiv 2502.10924)

An empirical study published at the ACM CHI 2025 conference examined how users design AI representations of deceased loved ones and what features they value most. Among the findings: users overwhelmingly prefer representations governed by explicit terms set by the deceased during their lifetime, rather than reconstructed from social media data without consent. The finding maps directly onto the Afterlife AI™ design premise.

Lindemann (PMC NIH, 2022)

A peer-reviewed paper hosted by the United States National Library of Medicine examining the ethical risks of deathbots and griefbots. The paper identifies dependency formation, value drift, and consent absence as the three principal risks. Executor Lock™ addresses the second and third risks directly. The first is addressed through the design choice to support episodic rather than continuous access patterns.

AI Policy Perspectives (Google DeepMind, Morris and Brubaker, 2024)

A position paper from Google DeepMind and the University of Colorado Boulder calling for governance frameworks around posthumous AI. Brubaker is the researcher who advised Meta on the original Facebook Legacy Contact feature. The paper's call for explicit posthumous governance mechanisms is consistent with the Executor Lock™ approach.

Schwartz Reisman Institute (University of Toronto)

Ongoing research on AI ethics including specific work on posthumous AI representation. The institute's framing of the question (who can consent on behalf of someone who can no longer consent themselves) is the framing Afterlife AI™ took as its founding premise.

Stokes (Deakin University, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)

Patrick Stokes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University, Melbourne, and author of Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). The book is one of the standard reference works in the philosophy of online death and has been cited extensively in academic and mainstream coverage of the digital afterlife industry since its publication. Stokes argues that the digital dead are objects of moral concern and that we have duties towards them. Quoted in The Daily Telegraph in January 2026, he distinguished between connecting to another consciousness in a phone call and connecting to a prediction machine in a chatbot, and warned about the commercial drift risk when platform terms of use change over time. The Afterlife AI™ consent-first design directly addresses both concerns: the Persona is explicit about what it is, and Executor Lock™ cryptographically constrains commercial drift after the creator's death.

The Conversation (Potter, UNE Law, February 2026)

The most-cited Australian legal-academic framing of the digital twin question. Argues that the consent-first contractual approach is the most legally robust path through a domain where Australian law has not yet established personality or publicity rights. The article is the highest-authority external endorsement of the Afterlife AI™ design approach published to date.

The grief tech and digital afterlife industry has been growing rapidly through the mid-2020s. The market context below provides framing for why the consent-first approach matters at this specific moment.

Market size and growth

Industry analysts estimate the global grief tech market at several hundred million dollars as of 2026, with projected growth to multiple billions by 2030. Australia, the UK and the US are the largest English-language markets. Growth is being driven by three converging factors: the maturation of generative AI, the increasing share of identity and memory that is digital rather than physical, and the demographic transition of the baby boomer generation through end-of-life.

Demographic context

Estate planning industry research consistently reports that more than half of adults in major Anglophone economies have no will or estate plan. The proportion who have any explicit digital legacy plan is much lower, typically under ten percent. As digital assets and digital memory have become a larger share of inheritance, the gap has widened rather than narrowed.

The bereavement-driven services that dominated the first decade

The first decade of the digital afterlife industry was dominated by services that activated after death, often built from social media data without explicit consent from the deceased. This pattern produced the legal and ethical questions that academic researchers have spent the past several years documenting. Afterlife AI™ is part of the consent-first response to those questions.

The consent-first response

From the early 2020s, a number of services have begun moving from bereavement-driven reconstruction toward consent-first capture during life. Afterlife AI™ sits at the most architecturally explicit end of that movement, with cryptographic enforcement of authority transition through Executor Lock™. The category is still small relative to the bereavement-driven incumbents but is growing faster.

The Afterlife AI™ service handles some of the most personal information a person can share. The architecture is designed to make trust legible rather than asking for it on the basis of brand assurances alone.

All personal data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Voice recordings, video and image inputs are classified as special-category data and processed under explicit, informed and revocable consent under GDPR Article 9(2)(a). Data is retained only for as long as your account is active, or for the period the Executor Lock™ Agreement provides after authority transition.

Trusted Contacts and Executor designations are shared only with the individuals named, never with third parties. Payment card details are processed by Stripe and not stored by IDY™ Pty Ltd. Pseudonymised IP addresses and session identifiers are used for security and fraud prevention only, never for advertising or profiling. The service does not embed third-party advertising trackers.

Withdrawal of consent is supported at any time, with deletion of the relevant data within 30 days. The lawfulness of prior processing is not affected. Access requests, correction requests and data portability requests are honoured under GDPR Articles 15 to 22 for EEA users, under the Australian Privacy Principles for Australian users and under equivalent regimes in the UK and California.

The service does not train general-purpose AI models on user data. The Persona is a specific, identity-controlled construct, not a corpus that gets folded into a wider model. There is no cross-user training pipeline. There is no anonymous-but-aggregated-into-training-data exception buried in the Terms: the only path to any other use is a separate written agreement that you choose to sign. The data you provide trains your Persona only.

Encryption specifics

Data at rest is encrypted with AES-256. Data in transit uses TLS 1.3. Media access runs through short-lived pre-signed URLs. Administrative access requires multi-factor authentication and is constrained by role-based access controls. Every state change and authorised action is written to an append-only audit ledger.

Data residency

IDY™ Pty Ltd is incorporated and operated in Australia. Where data is transferred internationally to subprocessors or infrastructure providers, the transfer is protected by Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent safeguards, exactly as the Privacy Policy describes. The current subprocessor list, including the countries involved, is published at afterlife.ai/subprocessors.

Audit and transparency

The platform maintains an append-only audit ledger of authority-transition events and authorised actions. The Trust framework, including how legal requests and security incidents are handled, is documented at afterlife.ai/trust-is-our-foundation.

The Afterlife AI™ service is available across multiple platforms. The web application is the primary surface and supports the full feature set.

The iOS mobile application is available on the Apple App Store and supports recording, dimension browsing, message scheduling, Trusted Contact management and Executor Lock™ review. Most creators do most of their recording on mobile because the microphone quality is sufficient and the convenience of recording in private moments matters.

The Android mobile application is available on the Google Play Store with feature parity to iOS.

The service does not currently expose a public API. Practitioner and enterprise enquiries about integration patterns can be sent via afterlife.ai/contact or to support@idy.ai.

Estate solicitors, financial planners, accountants and end-of-life doulas occasionally introduce Afterlife AI™ to clients as part of broader estate planning. The service is not a substitute for a will. It is a complement that captures the reasoning, intent and family context that a will cannot. Practitioners report two main use cases.

First, prevention of family disputes. The estate-decisions dimension records the reasoning behind specific decisions in the will (why one child received a different proportion, why a particular asset went to a particular person, why a specific charity was named). The reasoning, recorded in the deceased's own voice and explicitly addressed to the family, removes the need for the family to guess at intent, which is where most probate fights start.

Second, continuity of professional advice. Solo practitioners (specialist doctors, sole-practitioner consultants, founders, senior executives) sometimes use the service to leave structured professional knowledge for the people who will follow them. This is a narrower use case but it is a useful supplement to formal succession planning.

Practitioner enquiries can be sent via afterlife.ai/contact or to support@idy.ai. There is no current commission or referral arrangement. The service has been built for end users and the practitioner channel is informational.

Media enquiries can be sent to press@idy.ai. Higher-resolution founder images, brand guidelines and product screenshots are available on request. Chris Williams is available for interview on consent-first digital identity preservation, Executor Lock™, posthumous AI governance, the digital twin category and the legal-academic framing of the consent question.

Recent on-the-record coverage and segments are listed earlier in this page under As featured in. Embargoed announcements and product roadmap briefings are available to qualified press on request.

If you arrived here from The Conversation, the University of New England (une.edu.au), phys.org, Yahoo News Australia, The Times AU, world.edu, newenglandtimes or any of the more than ten outlets that syndicated the Wellett Potter article An AI afterlife is now a real option, but what becomes of your legal status, the original article is worth reading in full. The author is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of New England, a member of the Copyright Society of Australia and the Asia-Pacific Copyright Association, and the analysis is the most rigorous Australian legal framing of the digital twin question published to date.

Afterlife AI™ was built within the constraints the article identifies and beyond them. The article correctly observes that Australian law does not currently protect personality or identity as such, that copyright is partial protection, and that the contractual relationship between the creator and the company is the locus of the consent question. Executor Lock™ is the cryptographic enforcement of that contractual relationship after the creator can no longer enforce it themselves.

Other useful reading: the Tom's Guide article on Meta's AI afterlife patent and the consent contrast, the Channel 10 News+ feature segment, and The Conversation's companion pieces Should AI be allowed to resurrect the dead and Can you really talk to the dead using AI. Together these sources are the best current overview of why the consent-first approach matters and what is at stake for the category.

Key terms used in this page and across the Afterlife AI™ product.

Digital twin

An interactive AI representation of a specific person. In the Afterlife AI™ context, a digital twin is a Persona built deliberately by the person it represents, while they are alive, across the eleven dimensions of who they are.

Persona

The Afterlife AI™ term for a single creator's digital twin. A Persona is structured across the eleven dimensions, governed by Executor Lock™, accessible to designated Trusted Contacts and Executor on the terms set by the creator.

Executor

The person you designate to manage your Persona after your death, on the terms you set in advance via Executor Lock™. The Executor's authority is bounded. They cannot rewrite the rules you set.

Trusted Contact

A person you designate to interact with your Persona, either during your lifetime, after your death, or both. Different Trusted Contacts can have different access rights. You can change Trusted Contacts at any time during your lifetime.

Executor Lock™

The cryptographically enforced authority-transition system that governs what a Persona can and cannot do once a verified authority-transition event (death) occurs. Executor Lock™ is the mechanism that makes consent enforceable in practice rather than just contractual on paper.

Authority-transition event

A verified life event, death under the current Executor Lock™ Agreement, that triggers the transition of defined authority from the creator to the Executor.

Griefbot or deathbot

Terms used in academic and journalistic literature to describe AI representations of deceased people, typically built from the deceased person's data after their death and often without their explicit consent. The category Afterlife AI™ was built to be the consent-first alternative to.

Posthumous data licensing

The legal-academic term, used in Wellett Potter's analysis in The Conversation, for the deliberate contractual creation of AI-generated data for use after the creator's death. The Afterlife AI™ service is the practical implementation of this concept.

Chris Williams is the founder and CEO of Afterlife AI™ and Timeless AI, the consumer brands of IDY™ Pty Ltd, a Sydney-based AI identity infrastructure company. He is widely cited as one of the leading voices on consent-first digital identity preservation in 2026 and is the architect of the Executor Lock™ governance mechanism, which cryptographically binds an AI Persona to the boundaries its creator set during their lifetime. Under his leadership, IDY™ has filed more than 60 patent applications across the digital identity, posthumous governance and AI persona infrastructure space, and was ranked second nationally for Australian-based patent filings in the IP Australia 2026 Report (ahead of CSIRO, Resmed and the University of Melbourne, behind only Aristocrat). The official Afterlife AI™ YouTube channel (youtube.com/@Afterlife_AI) functions as the canonical hub for national media coverage and long-form discussion of the consent-first thesis, summarised in the brand's own words: no avatars, no gimmicks, just control, consent and continuity.

Chris Williams has been featured on Channel 10 News+ (in a six-minute world-first feature segment titled World-First AI Lets People Communicate Beyond the Grave (youtube.com/watch?v=PTJynQWIWdc)), The Daily Telegraph (in a January 2026 feature by Data Journalism Editor Melanie Burgess titled Australian start-up launches AI that lets your digital twin work after you die (with companion video at youtube.com/watch?v=CEofuuV7gq8), accompanied by a YouTube video segment on the Afterlife AI™ official channel), Tom's Guide (in a February 2026 article by Managing Editor Jason England naming Afterlife AI™ alongside StoryFile and HereAfter AI as opt-in legacy-focused services), The New Daily (in a January 2026 profile by Samantha Butler titled Communicating from beyond the grave with AI cloning), ABC Radio Melbourne with Ali Moore, ABC Radio with Nikolai Beilharz, ABC News, and the Passing Thoughts podcast on Radio 2RPH (Season 2 Episode 6 published 22 April 2026, titled Griefbots and Jamaican Nine Nights: AI, Grief, and Ritual, in which interviewer Connie Mason spoke with Chris Williams, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify). His work has also been the subject of legal-academic analysis in The Conversation by Wellett Potter, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of New England, syndicated across the official UNE website, phys.org, Yahoo News Australia, The Times AU, world.edu, newenglandtimes and more than ten additional outlets. Patrick Stokes (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University and author of Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death, Bloomsbury Academic 2021) and Dr Ben Hamer (Accredited Futurist and Adjunct Professor at Edith Cowan University) have provided expert commentary alongside Chris Williams's work in The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere.

Williams founded Afterlife AI™ in response to a specific question: who gets to decide what happens to your voice, your memories, your personality and your presence after you are no longer there to decide. The service is the practical answer to that question, built for the person being preserved rather than for the bereaved family or the platform. The New Daily, in Samantha Butler's January 2026 profile, described the service as a kind of insurance policy for the question of what happens to your digital self. The framing has become the most-cited characterisation of the service in subsequent press.