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Key takeaways

• Moxie Marlinspike's latest project is Confer, a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT.
• The concept that underpins Confer is "that your conversations with an AI assistant should be as private as your conversations with a person."
• The developer says conversations remain private and can't be stored or used for training purposes by third parties.

Moxie Marlinspike, the mind behind the secure messaging app Signal, has launched an alternative to AI chatbot ChatGPT that focuses on user privacy and security. 

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It's probably no surprise that the popularity of ChatGPT is leading it down a well-worn path: the arrival of ads. However, this shift also highlights how our data is currency that tech organizations are falling over themselves to profit from, as well as growing data privacy concerns connected with AI chatbots. 

Experts have warned of privacy and security challenges with AI technologies. Yet over 40% of workers have shared sensitive information with AI, according to research from the National Cybersecurity Alliance. So, could encryption be the solution to the privacy challenge?

Enter Confer

Moxie Marlinspike, cryptography expert and the founder of Signal, wants to create a step change. In December, he launched Confer, described as "end-to-end encryption for AI chats."

"With Confer, your conversations are encrypted so that nobody else can see them," Marlinspike said in a blog post. "Confer can't read them, train on them, or hand them over -- because only you have access to them."

According to TIME, Confer uses different AI models for different tasks, sourced from the open source community. More advanced modeling may be available in premium subscriptions. 

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Confer uses passkey encryption, server encryption, and the WebAuthn PRF extension. Typically, end-to-end encryption relies on private keys and local devices, and providing the same level of protection when accessing a web service poses challenges -- as even if passkeys are stored on your device, prompts and responses could be exposed. 

To resolve this issue, Confer operates in an isolated Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and uses remote attestation, which allows anyone to verify code running on its servers. Each release is signed and published to a transparency log. 

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"Confer combines confidential computing with passkey-derived encryption to ensure your data remains private," Marlinspike said. 

"This is different from traditional AI services, where your prompts are transmitted in plaintext to an operator who stores them in plaintext (where they are vulnerable to hackers, employees, subpoenas), mines them for behavioral data, and trains on them."

How to try Confer 

Once you've signed up with an email address and received a sign-in link, Confer will generate a passkey for you -- if your system supports passkey encryption. 

While it works best on Mac and Android, Windows and Linux users will need a compatible password manager. You'll then have access to the Confer dashboard, and if you've used ChatGPT in the past, this area will feel familiar. Start a conversation -- it's that simple. Free and paid options are available, although the free option has limitations at this stage of development.

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"The core idea is that your conversations with an AI assistant should be as private as your conversations with a person," the developer says. 

"Not because you're doing something wrong, but because privacy is what lets you think freely." 

Confer's future

Confer appears to be growing rapidly in popularity. Following its recent launch, Marlinespike said on X: "It has been cool to see so many people using Confer over the past few weeks, and I've been working to keep scaling up the backend! I remember the early Signal 24hr sustained traffic milestones (1 msg/sec, 10/s, 100/s, ...) and it's fun to see traffic climb through those again."

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Confer is in active development, with new features added frequently. One of the latest upgrades is the option to import your ChatGPT or Claude conversations. An iOS app is also on the horizon. It will be interesting to see how this project progresses and whether the idea of encrypted conversations with an AI model captures the general public's interest in the same way Signal did. 

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