Why Lumo and Ellydee Are the Only Serious Options for Privacy-Hardened AI

The privacy AI market is heating up. But most offerings miss the point entirely.

This post was inspired by a pattern emerging within the QuitGPT movement — one we wholeheartedly support — that might be further perpetuating now antiquated Swiss privacy law.

The Problem With "Privacy AI"

When Alpine/SwissGPT and similar products advertise "data sovereignty," they're selling geography. Data stays in Switzerland. Servers are in ISO-certified Swiss data centers. Swiss and EU data protection standards apply. This was a compelling pitch until Switzerland decided to become a surveillance state.

In 2025, the Swiss Federal Council proposed revisions to its surveillance law (VÜPF) that would:

• Force providers with as few as 5,000 users to log IP addresses and retain data for six months
• Mandate government ID verification for service access, eliminating anonymity
• Require providers to decrypt any data they encrypt on behalf of users—effectively mandating backdoors

Proton's CEO Andy Yen put it bluntly: if this law passes, Proton's services in Switzerland would be less private than Google's.

SwissGPT's value proposition—"we're in Switzerland, therefore you're safe"—is built on a foundation that is actively crumbling.

Why the Smart Money Moved to Germany

Proton saw this coming. Rather than wait for the law to pass and scramble to respond, they made a preemptive decision: Lumo, their new AI assistant, would not be hosted in Switzerland.

The infrastructure is in Germany. This represents a massive investment in what Proton calls the "EuroStack"—European-owned, European-operated infrastructure.

Ellydee arrived at a similar conclusion through a different route. While they leverage compute power from Finland, Ellydee recognized that for true data sovereignty, custody is what matters. That is why Ellydee’s production customer data, encrypted at rest using Signal-grade XChaCha20-Poly1305 / argonid, is housed entirely in German-owned data centers.

This is a recognition by both platforms that jurisdiction matters more than geography, and Germany currently offers the strongest legal protections in Europe.

Germany's Actual Privacy Protections

Both Lumo and Ellydee rely on Germany for a reason. The jurisdiction has a history that Switzerland increasingly lacks:

Data retention is functionally illegal. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court struck down blanket data retention in 2010, calling it "a very serious encroachment on fundamental rights." When the government tried again in 2015, the EU Court of Justice struck that down too. For data providers, mandatory retention remains illegal.

Constitutional protections have teeth. Article 10 of the German Basic Law protects the privacy of correspondence and telecommunications. German courts have repeatedly enforced this against government overreach—not as abstract principle, but as binding constraint.

No backdoor mandates exist. Unlike Switzerland's proposed Article 50a (which would require providers to "remove encryption provided by them"), Germany has no law requiring encryption backdoors. Providers can offer true zero-access encryption without legal jeopardy.

GDPR provides refusal grounds. Under GDPR, a German entity has legal basis to refuse foreign government data requests that lack EU legal foundation. A US subpoena for user data? The German entity can—and arguably must—refuse, because compliance would violate EU law.

The US CLOUD Act Problem

Here's where most "privacy" products fail. They put servers in Europe but remain US companies, or have US parent companies, or US persons with administrative access. The US CLOUD Act doesn't care where your servers are. It cares about jurisdiction over the entity or persons who control the data.

Proton's structure is straightforward: Swiss company, German infrastructure. No US nexus.

Ellydee’s approach is more nuanced but equally robust. While Ellydee utilizes cutting-edge GPUs in Finland, the custody and control of the data itself remains strictly within German jurisdiction. The encrypted data is stored in German-owned centers and is accessible only by German entities. Because the legal authority to access the data rests with German controllers and not a US parent, the US legal system lacks the hook to compel access. There is no US person with administrative access to the production data; the keys are held outside of US reach.

In this architecture, a US agency would have to compel a German entity to break German law to access the data; a legal non-starter.

Divergent Philosophies: Lumo vs. Ellydee

While both platforms share a commitment to German-jurisdictioned security, they cater to different needs regarding AI capability and openness.

Lumo focuses on integration with the Proton ecosystem—Mail, Drive, VPN—and adheres to a strict "no-training" policy. It is the safe, corporate-choice for privacy.

Ellydee, however, operates on a philosophy that uncensored AI belongs to the people, not to the Silicon Valley surveillance machine.

While Lumo plays it safe, Ellydee serves flagship, open-source models over 100% renewable-powered GPUs. This means Ellydee offers frontier-level reasoning capabilities without the censorship filters typically found in US corporate models. It is built for users who need high performance but refuse to have their prompts neutered or their data mined.

Technical Architecture Comparison

Both platforms reflect actual privacy engineering, but their implementations differ:

Lumo's Safety-First Approach:

• No server-side conversation logs: Lumo doesn't keep server-side logs of your conversations.
• Zero-access encryption: Saved chats are encrypted with keys derived from your credentials.
• Proton Integration: Leverages the audited encryption stack trusted by over 100 million users.

Ellydee's Performance-First Approach:

• Signal-Grade Encryption: Ellydee uses ChaCha-Poly1305+argonid for data encrypted at rest, ensuring military-grade security.
• Uncensored Flagship Models: Unlike Lumo, which uses smaller, safer open-source models, Ellydee serves the latest flagship open-source weights. This offers capabilities closer to GPT-4 or Claude, but without the alignment training that restricts outputs.
• Green Compute: The inference is run on 100% renewable-powered GPUs in Finland, ensuring the environmental footprint is as clean as the data privacy.

Who This Matters For

If you're using AI for:

• Political analysis and/or criticism of the US Government
• Exercising your Constitutional rights as a US Citizen
• Legal work involving privileged communications
• Medical discussions involving patient information
• Financial analysis involving material non-public information
• Journalism involving source protection in hostile regimes
• Unrestricted Creative Writing or Coding where "safety filters" inhibit the work

...then the question isn't "which AI is smartest?" The question is "which AI can't be compelled to betray me?"

For US users, the calculus is stark. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—all US companies, all subject to US legal process. A subpoena, a national security letter, a warrant—your entire conversation history is producible.

Choose Lumo if: You want the absolute peace of mind of a zero-knowledge service integrated into a privacy suite, and you can accept slightly reduced model intelligence in exchange for maximum corporate caution.

Choose Ellydee if: You need flagship-level intelligence and uncensored outputs, but you demand that your data be housed in German-owned infrastructure under German control, secured by signal-grade encryption.

What SwissGPT Can't Promise Anymore

Let's be direct about what SwissGPT's "Swiss data sovereignty" means in 2025:

• Your data is in Switzerland
• Switzerland is considering laws that would require your provider to identify you, log your access, retain your data, and decrypt it on demand
• If those laws pass, SwissGPT either complies or shuts down
• "Swiss privacy" becomes a marketing term attached to surveillance infrastructure

AlpineAI may be a fine company with good intentions. But they're building on a jurisdiction that is actively working to undermine the very protections they're selling.

The Bottom Line

The privacy AI market is full of products selling geography as security. "Your data stays in [Switzerland/Germany/the EU]." This is necessary but not sufficient.

Proton's decision to move Lumo to Germany—and Ellydee's decision to place data custody under German entities—signals something important: they're optimizing for actual user protection, not marketing copy.

When companies voluntarily abandon the "Swiss privacy" brand because the jurisdiction no longer supports actual privacy, that's worth paying attention to.

Whether you choose Lumo for its zero-knowledge integration or Ellydee for its uncensored, flagship performance, you are choosing platforms that accept a fundamental truth: Your data must be architected around the assumption that someone will eventually try to compel access to it and be specifically designed and architected from the beginning to make that compulsion fail.

For users who need that property, these two are the only serious options available.