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

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

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

Accessible 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’ll be able to add information to have the chatbot reply questions on them, and when you’ve got a Proton Drive account, you possibly can join it with Lumo to entry information saved within the cloud. Whereas the chatbot has entry to the online, it won’t discover you the most recent outcomes when you use it to look.

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 consumer knowledge to coach its fashions. It additionally stated Lumo depends on zero-access encryption, an encryption technique that different Proton merchandise additionally use, to let customers retailer their dialog historical past, which could be decrypted on the system.

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 terms of privateness.

“Lumo is predicated upon open-source language fashions and operates from Proton’s European datacenters. This provides you a lot higher transparency into the best way Lumo works than another main AI assistant. Not like 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 area: Final 12 months, it rolled out an AI-powered writing assistant for its Mail product that additionally runs on the consumer’s system.