Proton launches a privacy-friendly AI called Lumo

Proton has launched its own AI chatbot. Say hello to Lumo, the privacy-friendly AI.

Proton's announcement talks about how AI services are turning people into products, but also that AI can be useful when it is private.

Proton says that Lumo does not store any logs of your conversations on its server. The chats that you save are store on your device and encrypted. Speaking of which, the encryption implemented in Lumo is the same open-source tech that is used in Proton Mail, Drive, etc. The Switzerland-based company promises that it will not share any user data to third-parties, and that Proton and Lumo will not user your conversations to train the large language model. Its servers are based in Europe.

Proton also took a swipe at Apple, when it highlighted that it has not partnered with OpenAI or other AI companies based in America or China. In case you aren't aware, Proton filed a lawsuit against Apple last month regarding the App Store's policies, calling them unfair and anti-competitive.

Now, coming to Lumo, it uses 4 Large Language Models: Nemo, Mistral Small 3, OpenHands 32B, OLMO 2 32B (Allen Institute for AI).

You don't need an account to access the chatbot, but you will need one to save your conversations. Lumo's Ghost mode prevents chats from being saved. Lumo can search the web to fetch answers related to your query, offer writing assistance, and can even analyze files that you upload, and those stored in your Proton Drive. Currently, it only supports documents, so you can't use it with images or videos. On that note, I should point out that Lumo seems to be a text-exclusive chatbot, i.e. it cannot generate images or videos.

During my tests, I asked it questions about various topics, and it said that it does not have real-time browsing capabilities or have access to databases to fetch information from. That's a bit of a letdown, I suppose this explains why the AI doesn't need to be trained, it is designed for specific purposes like those I mentioned above.

You can try Lumo for free at https://proton.me/lumo-home or download the mobile app for Android and iOS.

EDIT: The above URL no longer works. Use https://lumo.proton.me/guest instead

(Thanks Boris and Tom for the update.)

The free version has some limitations, but users can optionally get Lumo Plus which offers unlimited daily chats, multiple large uploads, extended chat history and priority access to the bot.

Here is a chart that compares Lumo's privacy practices versus those of Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI ChatGPT and DeepSeek.

Normally, comparisons that portray a company's service as superior to its rivals is considered unethical, but given that the others are absolutely terrible for privacy, I think it is perfectly ethical.

No logs, no training, proper encryption, this is what AI services should have done right from the start. What do you think?

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