Proton’s new privacy-first AI assistant encrypts all chats, keeps no logs

Privateness-focused productiveness instruments maker Proton on Wednesday launched its AI assistant, referred to as Lumo, which it says prioritizes defending person knowledge.

The corporate says the chatbot retains no logs of your conversations, has end-to-end encryption for storing chats, and presents a ghost mode for conversations that disappear as quickly as you shut the window.

Obtainable through an online shopper, in addition to Android and iOS apps, Lumo doesn’t require you to have an account to make use of the chatbot and ask questions. You possibly can add recordsdata to have the chatbot reply questions on them, and you probably have a Proton Drive account, you’ll be able to join it with Lumo to entry recordsdata saved within the cloud. Whereas the chatbot has entry to the online, it won’t discover you the newest outcomes in the event you use it to go looking.

Proton appears intent on making it clear that its focus is on privateness. The corporate says Lumo is predicated on open-source fashions, and it’ll solely depend upon them for analysis and improvement going ahead with out using person knowledge to coach its fashions. It additionally stated Lumo depends on zero-access encryption, an encryption methodology that different Proton merchandise additionally use, to let customers retailer their dialog historical past, which might be decrypted on the machine.

All through its weblog put up about Lumo, Proton emphasised its European base, saying it offers the corporate a leg up over AI firms based mostly within the U.S. and China in the case of privateness.

“Lumo is predicated upon open-source language fashions and operates from Proton’s European datacenters. This offers you a lot larger transparency into the best way Lumo works than every other main AI assistant. In contrast to Apple Intelligence and others, Lumo shouldn’t be a partnership with OpenAI or different American or Chinese language AI firms, and your queries are by no means despatched to any third events,” Proton stated.

This isn’t Proton’s first foray into the fast-developing AI instruments house: Final yr, it rolled out an AI-powered writing assistant for its Mail product that additionally runs on the person’s machine.