Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT

If you’re concerned about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants can be alarming. It is difficult to use without sharing personal information, which is stored by the parent company of the model. With OpenAI have tried advertisingIt’s easy to imagine the same data collection as Facebook and Google creeping into chatbot conversations.

The new project, launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, shows what a privacy-aware AI service could look like. Conference designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is structured to collect data, with open-source rigor that makes Signal reliable. Your Confer chats cannot be used to train models or target ads, as only hosts will not be able to access them.

For Marlinspike, the protection is a response to the intimate nature of the service.

“It’s a form of technology that actively encourages contention,” says Marlinspike. “A chat interface like ChatGPT knows more about people than any other technology before it. When you combine it with advertising, it’s like someone paying your therapist to convince you to buy something.”

Ensuring privacy requires a number of different systems to work in concert.

First, Confer encrypts messages to and from the system using it WebAuthn password system. (Unfortunately, these defaults work best on mobile devices or Macs running Sequoia, although you can also do this on Windows or Linux with a password manager.) On the server sideall Confer inference processing takes place in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), with a remote attestation system to verify the system has not been compromised. Inside, there are various open-weight base models that handle any query.

The result is more complex than the standard inference setup (which is already complex enough), but it delivers on Confer’s basic promise to users. As long as these protections are in place, you can have a sensitive conversation with the model without any information being leaked.

Confer’s free tier is limited to 20 messages per day and five active chats. Users willing to pay $35 per month will get unlimited access, as well as advanced models and personalization. That’s more than ChatGPT’s Plus plan – but privacy doesn’t come cheap.