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

Privateness-focused productiveness instruments maker Proton on Wednesday launched its AI assistant, referred to 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 by way of a net 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 may add recordsdata to have the chatbot reply questions on them, and when you have a Proton Drive account, you possibly can join it with Lumo to entry recordsdata saved within the cloud. Whereas the chatbot has entry to the net, it may not discover you the most recent outcomes in case you use it to look.

Proton appears intent on making it clear that its focus is on privateness. The corporate says Lumo relies 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 mentioned Lumo depends on zero-access encryption, an encryption methodology that different Proton merchandise additionally use, to let customers retailer their dialog historical past, which may be decrypted on the machine.

All through its weblog submit about Lumo, Proton emphasised its European base, saying it offers the corporate a leg up over AI corporations primarily based within the U.S. and China with regards to privateness.

“Lumo is based upon open-source language models and operates from Proton’s European datacenters. This gives you much greater transparency into the way Lumo works than any other major AI assistant. Unlike Apple Intelligence and others, Lumo is not a partnership with OpenAI or other American or Chinese AI companies, and your queries are never sent to any third parties,” Proton mentioned.

This isn’t Proton’s first foray into the fast-developing AI instruments house: Final 12 months, it rolled out an AI-powered writing assistant for its Mail product that additionally runs on the consumer’s machine.