Proton, the company behind Proton VPN, Proton Mail and Proton Pass, is dipping its toes into the increasingly crowded artificial intelligence swimming pool. The company announced a privacy-first generative AI assistant, named Lumo, on Wednesday, which aims to be a ChatGPT alternative for folks concerned about how their data is being used.
Proton VPN is one of my favorite virtual private networks because it doesn’t cut corners on privacy while also being user-friendly, fast and great for unblocking streaming services like Netflix. In addition to its VPN service, Proton offers a productivity suite including a password manager, cloud storage and an email client. Where Proton differs from competitors like Google and Yahoo is with its focus on privacy and security -- Proton Mail, for instance, touts end-to-end encryption so only you can read your emails. That focus on privacy makes Proton stand out from other AI chatbot services, which tend to be hungrier for user data.
Proton’s Lumo AI assistant is free to use, but there’s a paid Lumo Plus upgrade that costs $13 a month (or $120 a year on the annual plan). Lumo Plus provides unlimited chats, unlimited chat favorites, an extended chat history and the ability to upload both large and multiple files. You can use Lumo in a web browser or download an Android or iOS mobile app. Signing in with a Proton account lets you store and view conversations while still maintaining zero-access encryption, according to the company.
Here’s everything you need to know about Proton’s Lumo gen AI assistant, from what it is and how it works to unique privacy features that aim to set it apart from chatbot competitors.
Proton’s privacy-focused design aims to set Lumo apart from other gen AI assistants
There are tons of AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. AI chatbots are powered by large language models, or LLMs, and require extensive human-created data to train on. The information LLMs are trained on can come from various sources, like content published on the internet, as well as user inputs. For instance, if you ask ChatGPT a question, the LLM will usually learn from your responses to it to get a more personalized response in the future (unless you’ve specifically turned that setting off).
But Proton’s Lumo AI assistant strives to set itself apart from other chatbots by providing better privacy and encryption than its competitors. According to Proton, conversations with Lumo are confidential, meaning they’re not used to train the company’s LLM and are only “readable” on your device. The company claims that your user chats are stored using Proton’s zero-access encryption, so they can only be decrypted on your device.
Like other artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, Lumo can be used for various purposes, from asking fundamental questions like the best ways to stay hydrated in the summer heat to rewriting an email or assistance with coding and programming. In an effort to boost privacy, Lumo will not search the web by default, but you can enable it, which will give Lumo access to what the company calls “privacy-friendly search engines” for accessing real-time information. I’ve reached out to Proton for more information about what search engines Lumo specifically uses. In addition to web search, Lumo lets you upload files for analysis, and there’s integration with the company’s cloud storage solution, Proton Drive, which is an open-source alternative to Google Drive.
Another element that makes Lumo unique is the jurisdiction of its parent company. Jurisdiction for companies can be important, particularly for privacy-focused services like VPNs. And unlike many of the major chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, Proton’s Lumo is subject to Swiss law -- a company outside of the Five, Nine and 14 Eyes data-sharing alliances. Theoretically, if Lumo truly isn’t learning from your data and all of your chats remain encrypted, with decryption limited to your device, your information shouldn’t be accessible to Proton or any third parties. But Proton’s privacy-friendly jurisdiction may be nice for folks with serious privacy concerns, like investigative journalists, asylum seekers or political activists.
Proton VPN Founder and CEO Andy Yen said in a press release, “Big Tech is using AI to supercharge the collection of sensitive user data to accelerate the world’s transition to surveillance capitalism. For this reason, we believe it is essential to provide an alternative that protects privacy and serves users as opposed to exploiting them. AI should not become the world’s most powerful surveillance tool, and our vision for Lumo is AI that puts people ahead of profits.”
Lumo promises some neat privacy features, but still requires a trust fall
Proton has a strong reputation for privacy and security, but you’ll ultimately need to trust that the company lives up to its promises. Proton has a solid track record with transparency, undergoing annual audits with its VPN product and publishing annual transparency reports. Nearly every VPN company boasts about a strict no-logs policy, and while zero-log claims can’t be completely verified without any uncertainty, audits offer important trust signals for its users.
Privacy is a major concern with AI. Perusing an AI’s privacy policy and terms of service can help give you a sense of how your data is being used. But it's difficult to verify that an AI chatbot isn’t training on user data.
But because Lumo is open-source, like the rest of Proton’s apps -- including Proton Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN, Pass and Wallet -- anyone can view the source code to inspect for bugs or vulnerabilities. You’ll still need to take the company’s claims at face value and with a grain of salt, but by keeping its artificial intelligence assistant open-source, Proton aims to bolster its trust and transparency. With its excellent overall privacy and transparency exhibited in its other apps, Proton offers peace of mind that may extend to its Lumo chatbot.
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