I Tried Proton’s Privacy-First AI Chatbot to See If It’s Better Than ChatGPT
If you're a regular Lifehacker reader, you'll know Proton develops a range of privacy-first products, including an email service, a VPN , and cloud storage . It also now has its own AI chatbot, called Lumo—first launched in August 2025, and recently upgraded with a host of new capabilities, including image generation. Having given Lumo 1.0 a test run last year, I found it a capable AI assistant. While it wasn't on the same level as apps like ChatGPT and Gemini, it got close enough to make it worth considering if you didn't want to deal with OpenAI and Google. Now that Lumo 2.0 is live, I was keen to give it another go. Lumo is available on the web , on Android , and on iOS , and you can get started for free—you don't even need a Proton account. As you might expect, there's a $12.99 per-month Pro tier available, which gets you features like a full chat history, more advanced AI models, and higher usage rates in terms of chats and file sizes. Unfortunately, the Pr...
