Proton’s new Privacy First AI Assistant encrypts all chats and does not keep logs

Proton, a manufacturer of privacy-focused productivity tools, released an AI assistant called Lumo on Wednesday.

The company offers chatbots that do not maintain logs of conversations, and have end-to-end encryption to store chats, providing a ghost mode of conversations that disappears as soon as you close the window.

Available via web clients and Android and iOS apps, Lumo does not need to have an account to ask questions using the chatbot. Upload the file and answer the questions to the chatbot. If you have a Proton Drive account, you can connect to LUMO and access files stored in the cloud. Chatbots have web access, but you may not find the latest results when used for searches.

Proton appears to be intended to clarify that its focus is on privacy. The company says Lumo is based on an open source model and will rely solely on future research and development, without using user data to train the model. Lumo also relies on zero-access encryption, a encryption method that other proton products use, allowing users to store conversation history that can be decrypted on their devices.

Through a blog post about Lumo, Proton highlighted its European bases and said that when it comes to privacy, it would step into the company with AI companies based in the US and China.

“LUMO is based on an open source language model and works from Proton’s European data centers. This gives Lumo much more transparency than other major AI assistants. Unlike Apple Intelligence, Lumo is not a partnership with Openai or other American or Chinese AI companies, and your questions will not be sent to third parties.

This is not the first foray into the rapidly developing AI tool space for protons. Last year, we deployed an AI-equipped writing assistant for email products that run on users’ devices.