Signal creator's Confer: private AI at $34.99 a month

The big three chatbots—OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini—are set by default to collect and store conversations, with no restrictions in many cases on how that data is shared or sold, used to train the tools, or handed over under legal process. The strongest contractual exception is zero data retention, or ZDR, but it is available only for paid enterprise and developer accounts, not average users. Even then it has exceptions: Anthropic does not offer ZDR for its most sophisticated "Mythos-class" models like Fable 5.1, OpenAI announced last month that its ZDR implementations will analyze user activity prior to deletion, and Google warns that it logs some Gemini prompts for abuse monitoring even with ZDR enabled.

For consumers, most privacy-focused services rely on promises rather than technical guarantees. Proton's Lumo simply promises not to log conversations, while Venice.ai and Duck.ai act as proxies that relay requests to other services such as Claude or ChatGPT, which can still collect the messages. Matt Green of Johns Hopkins points out that even stripped of identifying metadata, messages can often contain identifiable information, because asking about local coffee shops reveals where you live.

A stronger approach is the trusted execution environment, a hardware setup most often using Nvidia's Confidential Computing, in which queries are processed on isolated hardware and the server can cryptographically prove the rest of the system has no access. Confer uses that setup along with passkey authentication and open-source code. Meta uses a TEE for an Incognito version of Meta AI in WhatsApp, and Apple's Private Cloud Compute enforces its promise not to read conversations with Apple Intelligence. Local tools such as Ollama, LMStudio, or LocalAI keep data on your computer but, as Green warns, are far less capable. Whether privacy-first AI can sustain itself without data-driven profits remains unclear, and the outcome hinges on whether users will pay $34.99 a month rather than $20, and whether providers keep their promises if they cannot.