- Lumo 2.0 release revamps Proton’s privacy-first assistant with reasoning modes, image generation/recognition, quoted live web search and persistent memory
- The privacy stack blends cryptography and politics: zero-access encryption protects stored chats and images, while inference-time protection relies on Proton’s no-logs/no-training promises that have held true in the past
- Proton’s Lumo 2.0 Lite and Lumo 2.0 Max score 127% and 240% higher than the Lumo 1.4 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, making them close to last-generation frontier AI models
Proton has unveiled Lumo 2.0, its updated AI alternative to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini that focuses primarily on privacy, a completely different approach from most competitors.
The new update is not only smarter than its predecessor at what it does, but also brings a number of new capabilities: reasoning modes, image generation and recognition, live web search with citations, persistent memory, and custom 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 of its VPN product range.
Upgrades, more models and faster performance
The biggest upgrade to Lumo 2.0 is that it is now multi-modal, allowing it to gather 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 ‘daily queries’, while admitting that complex tasks still take a significant amount of time.
Users can also leverage “Custom Lumos” or custom-built assistants that store instructions in memory while still maintaining the encryption promise that Lumo offers, allowing users to avoid starting over every time they have a query to solve.
Users can either use the fast, general-purpose Lite model for everyday queries and choose 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 questions.
Pricing ranges from a free tier for what Proton calls daily 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 for 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 on TechRadar.
It’s important to note that while the Lumo 2.0 is a huge upgrade over its older 1.4 version, it doesn’t come as close to frontier models as Proton might want it to 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 the Claude, comparable to its own (F) it’s much closer to older frontier models like GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8.
This is not entirely surprising, as you can find the underlying technology 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 results roughly identical to the numbers it currently quotes.
Despite its limitations compared to newer frontier AI models, Lumo 2.0 is arguably the most privacy-focused approach to AI currently available to most end users, and it comes significantly closer than its predecessor to what has been an increasingly uphill task of late: offering a competitive privacy-centric alternative to billion-dollar proprietary AI models built from Open AI models from Google and Anthropic.
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