diff --git a/src/App.tsx b/src/App.tsx
index 1ac335c..35493c4 100644
--- a/src/App.tsx
+++ b/src/App.tsx
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ import { LoginScreen } from './components/LoginScreen'
 import { DashboardLayout } from './components/DashboardLayout'
 import { AccessibilityProvider } from './contexts/AccessibilityContext'
 import { DetailPanelProvider } from './contexts/DetailPanelContext'
+import { initModel } from './lib/embedding-model'
 
 function SkipButton({ onSkip }: { onSkip: () => void }) {
   const [visible, setVisible] = useState(false)
@@ -47,6 +48,10 @@ function App() {
   const [phase, setPhase] = useState<Phase>('login')
   const cursorPositionRef = useRef<{ x: number; y: number } | null>(null)
 
+  useEffect(() => {
+    initModel()
+  }, [])
+
   const skipToLogin = () => setPhase('login')
 
   return (
diff --git a/src/lib/embedding-model.ts b/src/lib/embedding-model.ts
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1415509
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/lib/embedding-model.ts
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+import { pipeline, type FeatureExtractionPipeline } from '@xenova/transformers'
+
+let extractor: FeatureExtractionPipeline | null = null
+let loading = false
+
+export async function initModel(): Promise<void> {
+  if (extractor || loading) return
+  loading = true
+  try {
+    extractor = await pipeline('feature-extraction', 'Xenova/all-MiniLM-L6-v2') as FeatureExtractionPipeline
+  } catch {
+    // Silently swallow — model unavailable, semantic search won't activate
+  } finally {
+    loading = false
+  }
+}
+
+export async function embedQuery(text: string): Promise<number[]> {
+  if (!extractor) throw new Error('Model not loaded')
+  const output = await extractor(text, { pooling: 'mean', normalize: true })
+  return Array.from(output.data as Float32Array)
+}
+
+export function isModelReady(): boolean {
+  return extractor !== null
+}