Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-minded alternative to ChatGPT

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

A new project, launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, shows what a privacy-driven AI service might look like. Remain it’s designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is configured to avoid data collection, with the open source rigor that makes Signal so reliable. Your Confer conversations 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 protections are a response to the intimate nature of the service.

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

Ensuring privacy requires many different systems working together.

First, Confer encrypts messages to and from the system using the WebAuthn password system. (Unfortunately, this template 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 of Confer’s inference processing takes place in a trusted execution environment (TEE), with remote attestation systems to verify that the system has not been compromised. Within this, there are a number of open-weight foundation models that handle whatever query arises.

The result is much more complex than a standard inference setup (which is already complex enough), but it fulfills Confer’s core promise to users. As long as these protections are in place, you can have sensitive conversations with the model without leaking any information.

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