Proton has made quite a name for itself over the past several years, putting a privacy-first focus on all of its applications, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and more. In the past year, the company also launched its first foray into the AI market with Scribe, an AI writing assistant that is embedded directly in Proton Mail, allowing users to take advantage of AI assistance without worrying about Big Tech gathering their data.
Now, though, the company is gearing up for its next big release: a full-fledged AI chatbot called Lumo. Unlike ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — all of which gather user data and continue to hold onto it for training and archival purposes — Lumo is completely privacy-first, Proton claims. That means all of your chats with Lumo are completely end-to-end encrypted. Additionally, the company claims that it won’t keep logs of your chats, and that any chat history or usage of the AI can only be accessed on the user’s device.
A reprieve from Big Tech’s AI data gathering
While AI can be helpful, there’s always been the inherent problem of the data generated when we use AI being hoarded by companies like Meta, OpenAI, and more. This often means that any chats you have with the AI — whether Gemini, ChatGPT, or Anthropic’s Claude — could be archived and used to train the AI models further, helping to make them stronger.
While this sounds fine enough on paper, it also means that anything told to the AI chatbot is fair game for the algorithms and machine learning processes to save, break down, and regurgitate elsewhere. This is why you see so many warnings not to share private or identifying information with AI chatbots. AI chatbots just aren’t private, and AI doesn’t go out of its protect your privacy either.
With Lumo, though, Proton says it’s finally giving users a way to benefit from the usefulness of AI without having to sacrifice their data. It’s a point of contention that has made Proton one of the few companies worth keeping an eye on, as the use of end-to-end encryption in everything the company does goes a long way toward helping you feel like your data is secure and safe.
Lumo is feature-rich
Proton says that Lumo will not save any logs of conversations, and that chat histories can only be accessed from the user’s device. Further, it builds off the same zero-access encryption that Proton has made the core of its services over the past 11 years. This means no data is shared from your conversations with Lumo, and that the data isn’t used to train AI.
And finally, Proton says that Lumo is powered by a completely open-source large language model that has been optimized by the company. And on European servers, the entire code is open-source, meaning that anyone can see how secure it is and exactly what it does.
But the good news doesn’t stop there, as Proton says Lumo is also optimized to allow for web search, file uploads, and full integration with Proton Drive, the company’s encrypted Google Drive alternative, which also supports Proton Docs, a fully encrypted Google Docs alternative.
Lumo is available to the public starting today, and you can access it for free at lumo.proton.me or by downloading the Lumo app on Android or iPhone devices. If you want to unlock even more from the chatbot, you can subscribe to Lumo Plus for $12.99 to access unlimited chats, extended chat history, and other premium features.
