Proton is launching a privacy-focused AI chatbot

Proton, the corporate behind the encrypted e-mail service Proton Mail, has launched an AI assistant aimed toward preserving person privateness. The brand new chatbot, known as Lumo, can summarize paperwork, generate code, write emails, and extra, whereas storing knowledge regionally on customers’ units.

Proton says it would defend this data utilizing “zero-access” encryption, which grants customers an encryption key that solely they’ll use to view their content material, stopping third events, together with Proton, from accessing the knowledge. This helps be certain that Proton can’t share person knowledge with advertisers or governments, or use it for coaching massive language fashions, Proton says.

Although Lumo comes with the flexibility to go looking the net, Proton turns this characteristic off by default to “give customers most privateness.” If customers allow the characteristic, Lumo will search the net for solutions utilizing “privacy-friendly” search engines like google and yahoo. Moreover, Proton says Lumo can analyze uploaded recordsdata, but it surely doesn’t save any of its data. Customers can hyperlink Proton Drive recordsdata to Lumo as effectively, that are supposed to remain end-to-end encrypted when interacting with the chatbot.

Proton positions its AI chatbot as an alternative choice to those provided by bigger firms, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. “Large Tech is utilizing AI to supercharge the gathering of delicate person knowledge to speed up the world’s transition to surveillance capitalism,” Andy Yen, the CEO and founding father of Proton, says within the announcement. “Our imaginative and prescient for Lumo is AI that places individuals forward of earnings.”

Lumo is powered by a number of open-source massive language fashions that run on Proton’s servers in Europe, together with Mistral’s Nemo, Mistral Small 3, Nvidia’s OpenHands 32B, and the Allen Institute for AI’s OLMO 2 32B mannequin. The AI chatbot will subject requests by completely different fashions relying on which is better-suited for the question. “As an illustration, programming-related questions are dealt with by OpenHands, which focuses on coding duties,” Proton spokesperson Betsy Jones tells The Verge.

You’ll be able to entry Lumo now by heading to lumo.proton.me, or downloading the Lumo app for iOS and Android. Customers who don’t have an account with Lumo or Proton can solely ask the chatbot a “restricted quantity” of questions every week, they usually received’t have the ability to entry their chat histories. In the meantime, customers with a free account can view an encrypted chat historical past, add small recordsdata, and favourite a restricted variety of chats. There’s additionally a $12.99-per-month Lumo Plus plan for entry to limitless chats, prolonged encrypted chat historical past, limitless favorites, and the flexibility to add massive recordsdata.