Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT

If you’re concerned about privacy at all, the rise of AI-driven personal assistants could be alarming. It’s difficult to use one without sharing personal information, which is held by the model’s parent company. Since OpenAI is already testing ads, it’s easy to imagine the same data collection feeding Facebook and Google infiltrating your chatbot conversations.

A new project, launched in December by Moxie Marlinspike, Signal’s co-founder, shows what a privacy-minded AI service might look like. Confer is designed to look like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is designed to avoid data collection, with the open source rigor that makes Signal so reliable. Your conference 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 recognition,” Marlinspike says. “Chat interfaces like ChatGPT know more about people than any other technology before. And when you combine that with advertising, it’s as if someone is paying your psychologist to convince you to buy something.”

Ensuring privacy requires several different systems working in concert.

First, Confer encrypts messages to and from the system using the WebAuthn passkey system. (Unfortunately, this standard works best on mobile devices or Macs running Sequoia, although you can also make it work on Windows or Linux using a password manager.) On the server side, all of Confer’s inference processing takes place in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), with remote authentication systems in place to verify that the system is not compromised. Within that is a set of open-weight foundation models that handle any query that comes along.

The result is much more complex than the standard heuristics setup (which is already fairly complex), but it delivers on Confer’s core 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 conversations. Users willing to pay $35 per month will get unlimited access, along with more advanced templates and customization. That’s a bit more than the ChatGPT Plus plan — but privacy isn’t cheap.