Why Local AI Agents Can Access Your NAS (And Cloud Agents Cannot)
Why Local AI Agents Can Access Your NAS
Cloud-based AI agents like Cowork run in isolated virtual machines. They can only see files you explicitly share with them. Your NAS, network drives, mounted volumes, external drives - none of these exist in the cloud VM.
A local agent sees everything your Finder sees.
The Access Difference
When your NAS is mounted as a network drive on your Mac:
- Cloud agent: Cannot access it. The VM has no network route to your local NAS. You would need to upload files manually.
- Local agent: Sees it as just another folder. Can browse, read, write, organize files on your NAS exactly like any other directory.
This extends to everything mounted on your Mac:
- External USB drives
- SMB/NFS network shares
- iCloud Drive
- Dropbox, Google Drive (when mounted)
- Time Machine volumes
The Tradeoff
More access means more trust required. A local agent that can see your entire filesystem, including your NAS, has a larger potential blast radius than a sandboxed cloud agent.
This is why Fazm is open source. You can audit exactly what the agent does with that access. And the approval system means sensitive operations require your confirmation before executing.
Fazm runs locally and accesses everything your Mac can access. Open source on GitHub. Discussed in r/ClaudeAI.