Moxie Marlinspike Introduces a Privacy-First Alternative to ChatGPT

As AI assistants become more deeply woven into everyday life, concerns about privacy arae growing just as fast. Using chatbots like ChatGPT often means sharing personal thoughts, questions, and data  all of which may be stored, analyzed, or eventually monetized by the companies behind them. With OpenAI already experimenting with advertising, it’s not hard to imagine chatbot conversations following the same data-driven path as Facebook or Google.

Now, a new project from Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike is offering a very different vision. Launched in December, Confer aims to look and function like popular AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude, but with privacy built in from the ground up. The service is designed so that user conversations are never collected, stored, or used for training models or targeting ads. In fact, the system is structured so the service itself cannot access your chats at all.

Marlinspike says these safeguards are essential because of how personal AI conversations can become.

“It’s a form of technology that actively invites confession,” he explains. “Chat interfaces like ChatGPT end up knowing more about people than any previous technology. Combine that with advertising, and it’s like paying someone to influence your therapist.”

To achieve this level of privacy, Confer relies on several layers of security working together. Messages are encrypted using the WebAuthn passkey system, which works best on mobile devices and newer Macs, though it can also be used on Windows or Linux with the help of a password manager. On the backend, all AI processing happens inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), with remote verification systems ensuring the server hasn’t been tampered with. Within that secure environment, open-weight AI models handle user queries without exposing the data.

This architecture is far more complex than a typical AI setup, but it allows Confer to deliver on its core promise: users can have sensitive, personal conversations without worrying about their data leaking, being logged, or repurposed.

Confer offers a free plan with a limit of 20 messages per day and up to five active chats. A paid subscription costs $35 per month and includes unlimited usage, access to more advanced models, and additional customization options. While that price is higher than ChatGPT Plus, Marlinspike’s project makes one thing clear  true privacy in AI comes at a cost.