Signal founder launches ‘fully private’ AI chatbot

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike has launched a private open-source AI chatbot.

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike has launched a private open-source AI chatbot.

The platform’s creator has admitted despite being a fan of large language models, he has some reservations around privacy on many of the AI platforms, and he has developed Confer with this in mind.

He wrote in a blog post: “Confer is designed to be a service where you can explore ideas without your own thoughts potentially conspiring against you someday;

“A service that breaks the feedback loop of your thoughts becoming targeted ads becoming thoughts;

“A service where you can learn about the world – without data brokers and future training runs learning about you instead.”

He added that the process has been created to ensure users’ data is secure, rather than being sent to “a data lake specifically designed for extracting meaning and context”.

Marlinspike has claimed that Confer has been developed to make sure users’ conversations are fully encrypted before they leave their devices.

Prompts from users get encrypted and sent to severs, and they are only decrypted to generate a response in a secure data environment.

Rather than traditional passwords, a range of security tools are used – including passkeys like Face ID, Touch ID or a PIN – to create encryption keys.

Confer will then use “confidential computing” to respond, which uses hardware-enforced isolation to run the code in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).

Marlinspake added: “The host machine provides CPU, memory, and power, but cannot access the TEE’s memory or execution state.”