"Private" gets used for four completely different things in this category, and they protect you from four completely different threats. Here's how to tell them apart, so you can pick the one that matches what you're actually worried about.
First: what are you protecting against?
Most comparison articles skip this and go straight to a feature table, which is why people end up with a tool that's private in a way they didn't need. Three common worries, and they have different answers:
- •"I don't want my chats training a model." A settings toggle usually solves this, free, in the tool you already use.
- •"I don't want a company building a profile of me." This needs the identity link broken. No toggle does it.
- •"I don't want my data leaving my device or my network." This needs local or self-hosted models. Nothing else is sufficient.
The four kinds of "private"
1. Run the model yourself
Tools like Ollama, LM Studio, and Jan run open-weight models on your own hardware. Nothing leaves the machine, which makes this the strongest privacy guarantee available — it's not a policy promise, it's physics.
The cost is real: you need decent hardware, and open-weight models you can run locally are generally a step behind the largest hosted ones. Best when the requirement is absolute and you're willing to trade capability for it.
2. Business and enterprise tiers
ChatGPT Team/Enterprise, Claude for Work, and the various API tiers typically default to not training on your data and offer contractual guarantees around retention.
Genuinely useful, and the right answer for a company. But your account is still your account — the provider knows exactly who you are. This solves the training worry, not the profile worry.
3. Privacy-branded front ends
Services like DuckDuckGo's AI Chat put a layer between you and the model provider. This is the category that actually addresses the identity link, and it's the one most people don't know exists.
The thing to check is what the middle layer keeps for itself. A proxy that strips your identity from the provider but keeps a full named log of everything has moved the problem rather than solved it. Read that policy specifically.
4. Encrypted-storage chat apps
Some tools emphasize encrypting your chat history. Worth having — but notice it protects the archive, not the request. The model provider still received the conversation in readable form, because it has to in order to answer.
Encryption at rest and anonymity in transit are different properties, and marketing copy blurs them constantly.
Questions worth asking about any of them
- •Does the provider receive an account identifier with my request, or just the text?
- •What does the tool itself keep, for how long, and can its staff read it?
- •Is the privacy claim structural, or a setting I have to remember to keep switched on?
- •If it's free, what pays for the inference? Someone is paying for those GPUs.
Where Secure AI sits, honestly
Secure AI is category three. Your app talks to a server we run; that server talks to the AI provider with its own credentials. No account id, email, or name goes with the request — the provider sees the words and not the person.
Applying our own checklist to ourselves, since a comparison article that exempts its author isn't worth much:
- •We don't scrub your message text. Type your name in a prompt and your name goes through. We break the account link, not the contents.
- •We keep a 90-day log of exchanges keyed by a one-way hash of your account id. Pseudonymous, not anonymous: it can't be read backwards into a person, but one person's exchanges group together.
- •Stored history is encrypted with a key we hold, which means we are technically capable of decrypting it and don't as a matter of practice. If that distinction matters to you, category one is your answer, not us.
If you want the maximum guarantee, run a model locally — genuinely, that's the right call and we'd rather say so. If you want frontier-model quality without handing over an identity to go with it, that's the trade we're built for. The privacy policy has the details, and there's a side-by-side on the comparison page.
Try Secure AI free
Frontier AI chat — encrypted by default, with your identity stripped before any request reaches the provider.
This article is a general explainer, not legal advice. Other products are described from their public documentation and their policies change frequently — check the current terms of anything here before relying on it.