As customers, companies, and governments flock to the promise of low-cost, quick, and seemingly magical AI instruments, one query retains getting in the way in which: How do I preserve my knowledge personal?
Tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and others are quietly scooping up and retaining person knowledge to enhance their fashions or monitor for security and safety, even in some enterprise contexts the place corporations assume their data is off limits. For extremely regulated industries or corporations constructing on the frontier, that grey space might be a dealbreaker. Fears about the place knowledge goes, who can see it, and the way it is perhaps used are slowing AI adoption in sectors like healthcare, finance, and authorities.
Enter San Francisco-based startup Assured Safety, which goals to be “the Sign for AI.” The corporate’s product, CONFSEC, is an end-to-end encryption instrument that wraps round foundational fashions, guaranteeing that prompts and metadata can’t be saved, seen, or used for AI coaching, even by the mannequin supplier or any third get together.
“The second that you simply surrender your knowledge to another person, you’ve basically lowered your privateness,” Jonathan Mortensen, founder and CEO of Assured Safety, instructed iinfoai. “And our product’s purpose is to take away that trade-off.”
Assured Safety got here out of stealth on Thursday with $4.2 million in seed funding from Decibel, South Park Commons, Ex Ante, and Swyx, iinfoai has solely discovered. The corporate needs to function an middleman vendor between AI distributors and their clients — like hyperscalers, governments, and enterprises.
Even AI corporations might see the worth in providing Assured Safety’s instrument to enterprise purchasers as a approach to unlock that market, stated Mortensen. He added that CONFSEC can be well-suited for brand new AI browsers hitting the market, like Perplexity’s lately launched Comet, to offer clients ensures that their delicate knowledge isn’t being saved on a server someplace that the corporate or dangerous actors might entry, or that their work-related prompts aren’t getting used to “prepare AI to do your job.”
CONFSEC is modeled after Apple’s Personal Cloud Compute (PCC) structure, which Mortensen says “is 10x higher than something on the market by way of guaranteeing that Apple can’t see your knowledge” when it runs sure AI duties securely within the cloud.
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Like Apple’s PCC, Assured Safety’s system works by first anonymizing knowledge by encrypting and routing it by means of companies like Cloudflare or Fastly, so servers by no means see the unique supply or content material. Subsequent, it makes use of superior encryption that solely permits decryption below strict circumstances.
“So you’ll be able to say you’re solely allowed to decrypt this if you’re not going to log the info, and also you’re not going to make use of it for coaching, and also you’re not going to let anybody see it,” Mortensen stated.
Lastly, the software program operating the AI inference is publicly logged and open to evaluation in order that specialists can confirm its ensures.
“Assured Safety is forward of the curve in recognizing that the way forward for AI is dependent upon belief constructed into the infrastructure itself,” Jess Leão, associate at Decibel, stated in an announcement. “With out options like this, many enterprises merely can’t transfer ahead with AI.”
It’s nonetheless early days for the year-old firm, however Mortensen stated CONFSEC has been examined, externally audited, and is production-ready. The crew is in talks with banks, browsers, and serps, amongst different potential purchasers, so as to add CONFSEC to their infrastructure stacks.
“You convey the AI, we convey the privateness,” stated Mortensen.
