Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT

If you’re at all concerned about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants may be alarming. It’s difficult to use one without sharing personal information, which is held by the model’s parent company. With Open AI already testing advertisingit’s easy to imagine the same data collection that Facebook and Google sneak into your chatbot conversations.

A new project, launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, shows what a privacy-aware AI service could look like. Grant is designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is designed to avoid data collection, with the open-source accuracy that makes Signal so familiar. Your Confer calls cannot be used to train the model or target ads for the simple reason that the host will never have access to them.

For Marlinspike, these protective measures are a response to the intimate nature of the service.

“It is a form of technology that actively invites confession,” says Marlinspike. “Chat interfaces like ChatGPT know more about people than any other technology. When you combine that with advertising, it’s like someone paying your therapist to convince you to buy something.”

To guarantee that privacy, various systems are required that work together.

First, Confer encrypts messages to and from the system using the WebAuthn password system. (Unfortunately, that default works best on mobile devices or Macs running Sequoia, although you can also make it work on Windows or Linux with a password manager.) On the server sideAll Confer inference processing is performed in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), with external attestation systems to verify that the system has not been compromised. Within that is a series of open-weight foundation models that can answer any question that comes in.

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

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