‘Users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protections’: Proton makes its Lumo privacy-first ChatGPT alternative a lot more powerful
Publish Date: 2026-07-11 09:25:00
Source Domain: www.techradar.com
- Lumo 2.0 release rebuilds Proton’s privacy-first assistant with reasoning modes, image generation/recognition, cited live web search, and persistent memory
- The privacy stack mixes cryptography and policy: zero-access encryption protects stored chats and images, while inference-time protection relies on Proton’s no-logs/no-training promises that have held in the past
- Proton’s Lumo 2.0 Lite and Lumo 2.0 Max score 127% and 240% higher than Lumo 1.4 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, making them close in on last-generation frontier AI models
Proton has revealed Lumo 2.0, its updated AI alternative to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, focusing on privacy first and foremost, a distinctly different approach from most of its competition.
The new update is not only smarter than its predecessor at what it does, but also brings a host of new capabilities: reasoning modes, image generation and recognition, live web search with citations, persistent memory, and customizable assistants.
Lumo 2.0 looks to do all of this while leveraging zero-access encryption, no-logs, no-training, a pitch that makes it appealing to privacy-focused consumers, many of whom are already customers for its VPN product lineup.
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Upgrades, multiple models and faster performance
The biggest upgrade to Lumo 2.0 is that it is now multimodal, allowing it to glean information and cross-check a variety of sources without often forcing the user to defer to other AI engines for most tasks.
Proton cites a 76% faster speed for ‘everyday queries’ while conceding that complex tasks still take a considerable amount of time.
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Users can also leverage “Custom Lumos” or purpose-built assistants that retain instructions in memory while still maintaining the encryption promise that Lumo offers, allowing users to avoid starting from scratch each time they have a query to address.
Users can use either the fast, general-purpose Lite model for everyday…
