Proton Announces Lumo, a Private AI Chatbot

Proton today announced Lumo, a confidential AI chatbot built around privacy, security, and transparency. It’s available for free and with no account, but those with a Proton account can securely save chat history, and there’s a subscription offering with more functionality.

“Instead of using AI to serve people, Big Tech is turning people into products and using AI to accelerate the surveillance-capitalism business model built on advertising, data harvesting, and exploitation,” Proton’s Eamonn Maguire writes in the announcement post. “Artificial intelligence has the power to tackle humanity’s challenges, big and small, from scheduling meetings to modeling molecules. But to truly transform how we live and work for the better, we need an AI assistant built responsibly — putting people and privacy first.”

Lumo looks and works like ChatGPT, Copilot, and other AI chatbots with built-in web search and file upload features. But it offers some unique features like Ghost mode for not saving chats and Proton Drive integration so you can interact with your securely saved documents.

Lumo is backed by an unnamed AI model that is based on unnamed open source language models, and it runs on Proton’s European data centers. And here’s a particularly biting bit of commentary that makes it clear that even the most trusted U.S.-based AI is not to be trusted.

“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 notes. “Our research and development will remain focused on open models, which we will continuously improve and augment.”

Indeed, the important bit is what happens behind the scenes. Proton also doesn’t use your conversations to train the AI model behind Lumo. And unlike most other AI chatbots, Lumo encrypts your chats and never saves logs to keep your conversations private and your data under your control, and Proton cannot access or share that data. Proton says that this makes Lumo a better choice for those using AI with private information like health, finances, and other personal data.

Lumo is part of what Proton the EuroStack, a decade-long push to ensure that “Europe stays strong, independent, and technologically sovereign.” And thanks to a new Swiss government proposal to “introduce mass surveillance,” Proton says that it is spending over €100 million to move most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland and into “the EU proper” to ensure that customer data remains private. Lumo will be the first Proton product to move.

“Proton is embracing Europe and helping to develop a sovereign EuroStack for the future of our home continent,” the company says “Lumo is European, and proudly so, and here to serve everybody who cares about privacy and security worldwide.”

In addition to the free access, Proton is now offering a Lumo Plus subscription for $9.99 per month that provides unlimited daily chats, web search access, full chat history with search, unlimited favorites, the ability to upload and query multiple files, access to advanced AI models, and priority support.

You can try out Lumo for yourself on the Proton website. Or, you can download the Lumo app for Android or iPhone/iPad.