I started building Confer because I saw how amazing LLMs are, and as a result, how much of our data is flowing through them. Already, AI chat apps have become some of the largest centralized data lakes in history, containing more sensitive data than anything ever before. We are using LLMs for the kind of unfiltered thinking that we might do in a private journal – except this journal is an API endpoint to a data pipeline specifically designed for extracting meaning and context.

Our insecurities, our incomplete thoughts, our medical records, our finances, our correspondence – all end up there. And this is just the beginning. As LLMs continue to be able to do more, we should expect even more data to flow into them.

Right now, none of that data is private. It is shared with AI companies, their employees, hackers, subpoenas, and governments. As is always the case with unencrypted data, it will inevitably end up in the wrong hands.

I have been building Confer because I think it is essential that we create technology which allows everyone to get the full power of AI along with the full privacy of an encrypted conversation. Confer is built so that nobody has access to your conversations but you (not even me!).

Confer’s technology has been built on top of open weight models. While many people love using Confer for a wide variety of tasks, others have missed the frontier capabilities from proprietary models. This is also a moment that feels unlike any moment in technology before: the world is changing quickly; we need to prepare for a future that is coming fast. I want that future to be safe, private, and accessible — which requires acting now, at scale.

Ten years ago, I worked with Meta to integrate the Signal Protocol into WhatsApp for end-to-end encrypted communication. That enabled end-to-end encryption by default for billions of people. Now we’re going to do the same thing again, for AI chat.

As Confer continues to operate as an independent entity, I will also work to integrate Confer’s privacy technology so that it underpins Meta AI. Meta is building advanced frontier models, so this will combine the most private AI chat technology in the world with the most capable AI models in the world. As Meta builds more AI products beyond the basic chat paradigm, the privacy technology from Confer will be a part of the foundation of everything that is to come.