Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of the encrypted messaging app Signal, has launched Confer, an AI chatbot designed with end-to-end encryption to protect user privacy. Unlike mainstream services like ChatGPT and Gemini, Confer is engineered so that conversations cannot be used for training, advertising, or be accessed by the company, hackers, or law enforcement.
The platform uses open-source models and a combination of passkeys and trusted execution environments to encrypt data directly on the user's device before it reaches a server. This launch introduces a direct challenge to the data-centric business models of major AI developers and could influence industry standards for privacy, much as the Signal protocol did for messaging apps like WhatsApp.