January 16, 2026
Privacy vs Google: cage match
Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike wants to do for AI what he did for messaging
An AI that locks your chats; fans cheer, skeptics side-eye the Google login
TLDR: Moxie Marlinspike launched Confer, an AI assistant built to keep your chats unreadable even to the platform. The community splits: fans trust his privacy pedigree, while skeptics roast the Google login and app‑store trust. Pragmatists say it’s still the best simple option for normal people.
Moxie Marlinspike—the privacy folk hero behind Signal—just dropped Confer, an open-source AI assistant that promises your chats are sealed tight, even from the company itself. Think of it like a digital vault: conversations are encrypted end-to-end, and stored so only you hold the key. One expert even calls AI assistants the archnemesis of privacy, so this is Moxie aiming straight at the dragon. But the crowd has thoughts, and they are loud. Some cheer about Moxie’s track record—“He did WhatsApp’s end-to-end, we trust him”—while others roll their eyes at the irony: an ultra-private AI that lets you log in with Google. The vibe? Privacy vs convenience: round a million. There’s drama over whether running “privacy” apps from an app store is like locking the front door but leaving the window open, with one commenter warning that “one villain” in the supply chain could topple the whole castle. Then you’ve got the pragmatists asking, “What else would you give your parents?” Signal still wins for the non-tech crowd. Meme energy: lots of side-eye at “private AI, Google login,” plus the classic “Hacker News déjà vu” linking to prior threads. The takeaway? People want magic privacy that’s easy—just don’t make it smell like Big Tech.
Key Points
- •Moxie Marlinspike launched Confer, an open source AI assistant focused on end-to-end privacy.
- •Confer encrypts user data and model responses within a trusted execution environment, preventing operator access.
- •All components, including LLMs and back end, run on open source software that users can cryptographically verify.
- •Conversations are stored in encrypted form with keys kept on users’ devices.
- •The article contrasts Confer’s design with mainstream AI platforms subject to subpoenas, data preservation orders, and potential human review of chats.