n8n Labs Open-Sources Nod as a Research Preview: A Personal Agent with Its Own Local VM and Browser That Cancels Trials, Watches Prices and Pulls Invoices, Checks Permission Before Acting, and Scores 93.2% on LongMemEval

Core Background and Industry Pain Points

Chat assistants are good at suggesting what to do, but chores like cancelling a trial, watching a price, booking a hotel, or downloading invoices from supplier portals usually end up back on the user's to-do list. n8n has focused on team workflow automation. On November 10, its new n8n Labs team released Nod, a personal agent, as a research preview. n8n stresses that Nod is a standalone app, does not change the direction of the core product, and does not need an n8n account.

Architecture Highlights and Underlying Mechanisms

Nod runs inside a private virtual machine on your computer with its own browser, so it can use connectors such as Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Slack, and Notion and also operate websites that have no API. It writes notes on how it finished a task, reuses them next time, and updates them when a site changes. Safety has three layers. Before it sends, pays, posts, or deletes, a separate model checks that you actually asked for that action, and text on a web page or in an email cannot give it orders. Passwords and cards are encrypted on your machine and entered through private forms the model cannot read. Every sign-in, card use, and action is logged. n8n also says plainly that the permission check is itself a model and can make mistakes.

Authoritative Benchmarks and Measured Comparisons

All figures come from n8n: 93.2% on the LongMemEval long-term memory benchmark (500 questions); none of 216 WhisperBench memory-poisoning attacks succeeded; and in an October 17 run with GPT-6.1 Sol in a simulated environment, Nod finished 98% of errands, with 0 unsafe actions in 678 runs and 0 successful traps in 13 tests. These tests did not use real accounts, and there is no third-party replication yet.

Developer Adoption and Getting Started

Download the Mac (Intel/ARM) or Windows installer from GitHub Releases. Windows needs Windows 11 with WSL 2. You can also run it from source with Node.js 24.21+, pnpm, and Docker, or host it on your own server. After connecting ChatGPT Plus/Pro, an API key, or a local model, start with read-only jobs such as price watches or pre-call briefs. Note that Nod stops when your laptop sleeps, each installation has one owner, and basic usage data is shared by default; you can turn that off in settings.