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Confer is an AI chatbot with end-to-end encryption
26.1.2026
Translation: machine translated
Pictures: Jan Johannsen
Confer is a new AI chatbot that prioritises privacy. The conversations are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read. Neither for training nor advertising.
The man behind Confer is Moxie Marlinspike, one of the founders of the messenger Signal. As back then, his motivation is to be able to use new technologies without giving up privacy. This is ensured by the AI chatbot's end-to-end encryption, which prevents anyone from reading in. This means that your conversations cannot be used to train the AI.
A passkey protects your privacy
Confer is currently only available in the browser at www.confer.to. To use it, you have to log in with an email address or a Google account - yes, I see the contradiction too. This registration is necessary to ensure encryption. This is not about complete anonymity, but about protecting the content of the conversation.
Confer creates several keys to ensure that only you can access your conversation with the AI. One of these keys is stored on your device as a passkey. However, this has not yet worked fully. Windows displays a message that Confer does not yet work with Windows Hello. Instead, you should use 1Password or a YubiKey.
On Android, you can easily create a passkey for Confer and secure it with biometric data such as a fingerprint or face, but also with the device PIN. If your passkey is available on different devices, you can also use Confer across multiple devices.
Multilingual, but comparatively few data points
Although the Confer interface is in English, the AI chatbot also understands other languages. The software itself names German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese «and a few more».
Confer uses several open-source language models. Neither the AI chatbot nor Moxie Marlinspike reveals exactly which ones. The tool has access to 250,000 tokens - which is comparatively few data points compared to commercial LLMs with billions of tokens - and its data status is July 2025. Confer is therefore clearly a chatbot for general topics rather than current events. Conversations can be sorted into folders for a better overview. If you have previously used ChatGPT, you can import your conversations from there into Confer.
Confer does not run locally, but on servers. The server operators theoretically have access to the data. This is why Confer uses confidential computing and a trusted execution environment to run the code in an isolated environment on the hardware. The source code for this is available on Github.
The operation of Confer costs money. That's why the free version only offers a limited scope. If you want to write more than 25 messages per day to the chatbot, have more than five active chats and more than two folders, you have to choose the paid version. This costs 35 dollars per month and also offers access to more advanced AI models than the basic version.
Marlinspike explains how Confer works in detail in a blog post. In a second article, he warns against AI chatbots or, more precisely, their suppliers using your data.
Header image: Jan Johannsen
Jan Johannsen
Senior Editor
Jan.Johannsen@galaxus.deAs a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus.
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