Signal Founder Challenges OpenAI with Confer AI Privacy Assistant

Imagine if your therapist was being paid to convince you to buy a product. According to Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder of Signal, that's the current state of ad-driven AI models. To counter this, he launched Confer in December 2025, a new Confer AI privacy assistant designed to prioritize user anonymity over data harvesting.

The Tech Behind Confer AI Privacy Assistant

Confer doesn't just promise privacy; it enforces it through a complex backend architecture. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which retain personal information for model training, Confer's host never has access to your conversations. The service employs several layers of protection to ensure this zero-knowledge approach.

• Trusted Execution Environment (TEE): All inference is processed in a secure enclave, preventing unauthorized access even at the server level.
• End-to-End Encryption: Using the WebAuthn passkey system, messages are encrypted before they ever leave the user's device.
• Remote Attestation: A verification system that ensures the hardware hasn't been compromised before processing queries.

Comparing Confer AI and ChatGPT Plus Pricing

Privacy doesn't come cheap. While Confer offers a free tier, it is limited to 20 messages a day and 5 active chats. For heavy users, the premium plan is significantly more expensive than the industry standard.