Microsoft is testing a second Recall, and this one only remembers what you hand it

Recall's problem was never really the idea of a searchable memory. It was the method: screenshots of your screen, taken every few seconds, whether you were doing your tax return or reading something private. Project Pantheon turns that round. It remembers nothing unless you tell it to.

Gareth Smith at Windows Latest found an unlisted Microsoft Store listing under the name Context Vault and spent the summer using it. You save web pages, files, screenshots, copied text, audio and video as "memories", drop them into collections, and then ask questions about the pile in a chat tab. It hooks into the Windows Share menu, File Explorer and Click to Do, and it runs an MCP server, meaning other AI tools can read your saved material if you let them. The sidebar lists Library, Chat, Token usage, Timeline and Connections, which tells you roughly how finished it is.

Microsoft has announced none of this, and the open questions are the ones that matter. Pureinfotech notes the build it looked at can use cloud models with no NPU required, so some of what you save leaves the machine, and nobody outside Microsoft knows where it lands, when it is processed, or how you delete a memory permanently. Encryption and a Windows Hello lock have reportedly been considered. Neither is confirmed. Nor is there any sign Pantheon replaces Recall rather than joining it.

There is nothing to do about this today, which is the honest answer for an app that may never ship. Tendvane's Health score is the plainer version of the same curiosity: a summary of what is genuinely installed and switched on across your PC right now.