Moxie Marlinspike launches Confer, a privacy-focused AI chatbot with end-to-end encryption

Moxie Marlinspike launches Confer, a privacy-focused AI chatbot with end-to-end encryption

The Signal co-founder's new service promises chatbot functionality without the surveillance tax that comes standard with most AI platforms.

Moxie Marlinspike, the cryptographer who built Signal, launched Confer in December 2025, a chatbot service designed to deliver the kind of AI assistance you’d get from ChatGPT or Claude while making it structurally impossible for the operator to read your conversations.

How Confer actually works

On the client side, Confer uses WebAuthn passkeys to encrypt conversations directly on the user’s device before anything leaves it. On the server side, inference runs inside Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs, which are isolated hardware enclaves that process data without exposing it to the underlying system or the people running that system. Remote attestation allows users to cryptographically verify that the server is actually running what it claims to be running, not some modified version that quietly logs everything.

The result is an architecture where Confer’s operator cannot access, store, or monetize user conversations, not because of a policy that cou...