‘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 Rahimnoorali11@gmail.com (Rahim Amir) | usagoldmines.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.

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.

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 queries and defer to the more complex Max model for demanding work, or use Fast and Thinking modes, which offer twice the context window of its predecessor for larger workloads and greater coherence with more complex asks.

Pricing spans a free tier for what Proton calls everyday private use, a $12.99-per-month Lumo Plus plan with unlimited chats, Projects, advanced image generation and access to the most capable models, and a $14.99-per-user Lumo Professional tier for teams.

Lumo is also available to business users and offers the same upgrades discussed above, making it a significantly more powerful and smarter AI tool than it was when we last reviewed it at TechRadar.

It is important to note that while Lumo 2.0 is a huge upgrade versus its older 1.4 version, it does not come as close to frontier models as Proton might want to make it appear: its model scores a 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index which sees current frontier models clock in as high as 59 (GPT 5.6 Sol Max) or 60 (Claude Fable 5) versus its own comparisions that show it much closer to older frontier models such as GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8.

This is not entirely surprising, given that one can find the underlying tech Lumo uses in its privacy policy. Proton states that it uses a mix of Qwen 3.5, GLM 5.2, Image-Turbo, and FireRed-Image-Edit-1.1, with GLM 5.2’s scores roughly identical to the numbers it cites currently.

Despite its limitations versus newer frontier AI models, Lumo 2.0 arguably remains the most privacy-focused approach to AI available to most end users currently, and it comes considerably closer than its predecessor at what is an increasingly uphill task of late: offering a competitive privacy-centric alternative to billion-dollar proprietary AI models built by the likes of Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.