Signal co-founder launches Confer, a private AI chatbot that hides its model
Confer encrypts conversations so Marlinspike's own company cannot read them, and users cannot see or choose which underlying model is answering.
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Moxie Marlinspike, a founder of Signal, introduced Confer, an end-to-end encrypted AI chat service, in a blog post in late December 2025; it drew wider press coverage from mid-January 2026. Conversations are encrypted with a key generated and held on the user’s own device, so that — unlike with ordinary chatbot providers — Confer’s own operators cannot read them.
The service also withholds which underlying model is answering a given query, a deliberate choice Marlinspike argued protects both user privacy and the model’s safety guardrails against the kind of tampering possible when a model’s weights are exposed. A free tier runs a constrained model that declines some queries; a paid tier offers alternative models. Code running on Confer’s servers is open source and independently checkable against the published project.
The launch drew attention chiefly because of who built it: Marlinspike’s earlier work on Signal’s protocol underpins end-to-end encryption across most major messaging apps, and Confer applied the same design philosophy to AI chat, where consumer products from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google routinely retain conversation data server-side.