Create your AI Persona while you are still here to decide

This is a new and sometimes uncomfortable category, so we will be blunt about it.

What it is: a structured, private record of who you are, your values, stories, voice and instructions, captured by you while you are alive, and released to people you choose, on terms you set, enforced by Executor Lock™ after your death.

What it is not: it is not a resurrection, not a conscious being, not a legal version of you, and not a griefbot built from a dead persons data without their say-so. A Persona does not become you. It preserves what you chose to record, inside the boundaries you set.

Afterlife AI is not just a memory app. It is built on IDY’s patented infrastructure for consent-first AI identity, authority transition, cryptographic audit, Executor Lock™, persona portability and posthumous governance.

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, phys.org, Yahoo News Australia, The Times AU, world.edu, newenglandtimes, 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.

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, with long-term continuity options available.

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), long-term continuity options (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 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. Long-term continuity options 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.

The Afterlife AI™ service is offered as three plans: Free, Legacy and Eternal. 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.

Explore the platform:

• Personal AI, create an AI version of yourself

• Create a digital twin of yourself

• Digital legacy and digital estate

• Legacy planning and end-of-life planning

• Record your life story

• AI voice legacy, record and store your voice

• AI identity governance and Executor Lock

• Media coverage, legal and privacy, FAQ, research

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 contact page or to support@idy.ai.

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 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), 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), 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.