Proton Launches Privacy-Focused AI Assistant Lumo
Proton, the organization behind the encrypted email platform Proton Mail, has introduced a new AI assistant designed to prioritize user privacy. The chatbot, named Lumo, is capable of summarizing documents, generating code, drafting emails, and performing a variety of other tasks, all while ensuring that data is stored locally on the user’s device.
Proton has emphasized its commitment to protecting user information with “zero-access” encryption. This method provides users with an encryption key that only they can use to view their data, effectively blocking access to any third parties, including Proton itself. The company asserts that this structure ensures user data cannot be sold to advertisers or accessed by governments, nor utilized for training large language models.
Betsy Jones, a spokesperson for Proton, shared insights with Technology News regarding their security measures. The company employs TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption for data in transit, as well as “asymmetric” encryption for prompts, which permits only the Lumo GPU servers to decrypt them. “This guarantees that your queries and responses remain secure during transmission, only being decrypted by the GPU when necessary, and that your saved chats are solely accessible to you,” Jones explained.
While Lumo has the capability to search the web, Proton has opted to disable this function by default to enhance user privacy. Should users choose to activate web search, Lumo utilizes “privacy-friendly” search engines to fetch answers. Furthermore, users can analyze uploaded documents within the app without any retention of the data, and they can link files from Proton Drive, which remain end-to-end encrypted during interaction with the chatbot.
Proton positions Lumo as a viable alternative to AI offerings from larger tech corporations such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, stated, “Big Tech is using AI to supercharge the collection of sensitive user data to accelerate the world’s transition to surveillance capitalism. Our vision for Lumo is AI that puts people ahead of profits.”
Lumo is powered by a combination of several open-source large language models hosted on Proton’s servers in Europe, including Mistral’s Nemo, Mistral Small 3, Nvidia’s OpenHands 32B, and the Allen Institute for AI’s OLMO 2 32B model. The AI assistant intelligently routes requests through different models based on which is best suited for the task at hand. “For example, programming-related inquiries are managed by OpenHands, which specializes in coding tasks,” Jones noted.
Users can now access Lumo via the web at lumo.proton.me, or by downloading the Lumo app available for both iOS and Android devices. New users without a Proton account can submit up to 25 questions weekly and will not be able to view chat histories. Free account holders are permitted to make up to 100 requests per week, have access to an encrypted chat history, can upload small files, and can favorite a limited number of chats. For more advanced features, there is a subscription option priced at $12.99 per month, granting unlimited chats, extended encrypted history, unlimited favorites, and the capacity to upload larger files.
Update, July 23rd: Additional information regarding the encryption methods has been added.
