Proton has announced Lumo 2.0, a major upgrade that significantly expands the assistant's capabilities while maintaining the privacy protections that distinguish it from mainstream AI platforms.
The new release introduces stronger reasoning models, image recognition and generation, customizable AI assistants, encrypted memory, and enhanced web search, along with a new business offering designed for organizations that handle sensitive data.
Proton describes the release as the largest update since Lumo’s debut. According to the company, the new version has been rebuilt from the ground up and is intended to demonstrate that users no longer have to choose between advanced AI capabilities and strong privacy guarantees.
The announcement comes roughly a year after Proton launched the first version of Lumo as an open-source AI assistant built around zero-access encryption, a strict no-logs policy, and European hosting infrastructure. Unlike many competing AI services, Lumo does not use customer conversations to train language models, does not profile users for advertising, and keeps chat content inaccessible to Proton itself through its encryption architecture.
Among the most notable additions in Lumo 2.0 are substantially more capable reasoning models. Proton says its Lumo 2.0 Lite model scores 127% higher than the previous Lumo 1.4 release on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, while the flagship Lumo 2.0 Max achieves a 240% improvement. The company also claims user testing indicates that people can no longer distinguish the quality of responses generated by Lumo 2.0 Max from those produced by the latest commercial models offered by OpenAI and Anthropic.
The upgrade also brings multimodal capabilities, allowing users to upload, analyze, edit, and generate images within the same conversation. Lumo's web search functionality has also been expanded to include live search results and source citations, enabling the assistant to provide more up-to-date responses while improving transparency.
In addition, Proton has introduced user-controlled memory, encrypted Projects for organizing ongoing work, and Custom Lumos, which let users create specialized AI assistants tailored to specific workflows. According to Proton, all of this data remains protected by its zero-access encryption model.
Proton says thousands of organizations are already using Lumo and argues that conventional AI platforms can expose businesses to new risks because employee prompts may be retained, used for model training, or stored on infrastructure subject to U.S. government data requests. Lumo for Business is designed to address those concerns by ensuring conversations are never logged or used for training while providing administrators with tools to manage employee access.
Lumo remains fully open source, allowing independent researchers to verify its privacy and security claims.
Lumo 2.0 is available immediately in three tiers. The free version provides core AI functionality for personal use; Lumo Plus adds unlimited chats, Projects, advanced image generation, and access to Proton's most capable models, while the new Lumo Professional plan targets teams that require secure AI collaboration.
Leave a Reply