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

Privacy-focused productivity tools maker Proton on Wednesday released its AI assistant, called Lumo, which it says prioritizes protecting user data.

The company says the chatbot keeps no logs of your conversations, has end-to-end encryption for storing chats, and offers a ghost mode for conversations that disappear as soon as you close the window.

Available via a web client, as well as Android and iOS apps, Lumo doesn’t require you to have an account to use the chatbot and ask questions. You can upload files to have the chatbot answer questions about them, and if you have a Proton Drive account, you can connect it with Lumo to access files stored in the cloud. While the chatbot has access to the web, it might not find you the latest results if you use it to search.

Proton seems intent on making it clear that its focus is on privacy. The company says Lumo is based on open-source models, and it will only depend on them for research and development going forward without utilizing user data to train its models. It also said Lumo relies on zero-access encryption, an encryption method that other Proton products also use, to let users store their conversation history, which can be decrypted on the device.

Throughout its blog post about Lumo, Proton emphasized its European base, saying it gives the company a leg up over AI companies based in the U.S. and China when it comes to privacy.

“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 said.

This is not Proton’s first foray into the fast-developing AI tools space: Last year, it rolled out an AI-powered writing assistant for its Mail product that also runs on the user’s device.