- Lumo 2.0 version rebuilds Proton’s privacy assistant with reasoning modes, image generation/recognition, cited live web search and persistent memory
- The privacy stack mixes cryptography and politics: zero-access encryption protects stored chats and images, while inference time protection builds on Proton’s no-logging and 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 Lumo 1.4 on the artificial intelligence index, bringing them closer to the latest generation of AI models.
Proton has unveiled Lumo 2.0, its updated AI alternative to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, focusing first and foremost on privacy, a markedly different approach from most of its competitors.
The new update is not only smarter than its predecessor at what it does, but also brings a host of new features: reasoning modes, image generation and recognition, live web search with quotes, persistent memory, and customizable wizards.
Lumo 2.0 seeks to do all of this by leveraging zero-access, no-logs, and no-training encryption, a pitch that makes it attractive to privacy-conscious consumers, many of whom are already customers of its VPN product line.
Upgrades, multiple models and faster performance
Lumo 2.0’s biggest upgrade is that it is now multimodal, allowing it to glean information and cross-reference various sources without often requiring the user to rely on other AI engines for most tasks.
Proton cites 76% faster speed for “everyday queries”, although conceding that complex tasks still take considerable time.
Users can also use “Custom Lumos” or specially designed wizards that keep instructions in memory while retaining the promise of encryption offered by Lumo, allowing users to avoid starting from scratch every time they have a query to answer.
Users can use either the fast and versatile Lite model for everyday queries and defer to the more complex Max model for demanding jobs, or use the Fast and Thinking modes, which offer twice the pop-up of its predecessor for larger workloads and greater consistency with more complex requests.
Pricing includes 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 top models, and a $14.99 per user Lumo Professional tier for teams.
Lumo is also available for professional users and offers the same upgrades described above, making it a significantly more powerful and intelligent AI tool than it was when we last reviewed it on TechRadar.
It’s important to note that while Lumo 2.0 is a huge upgrade over its older version 1.4, it’s not as close to frontier models as Proton might have you believe: its model scores a 51 on the Artificial Analytical Intelligence Index which sees current frontier models reaching 59 (GPT 5.6 Sol Max) or 60 (Claude Fable 5) compared to its own comparisons which show it much closer to older frontier models such as GPT. 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8.
This isn’t entirely surprising, given that you can find the underlying technology that Lumo uses in its privacy policy. Proton says 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 being about the same as the numbers it currently quotes.
Despite its limitations compared to newer AI models, Lumo 2.0 remains arguably the most privacy-focused AI approach available to most end users today, and it comes significantly closer to its predecessor in what is an increasingly difficult task of late: providing a competitive privacy-focused alternative to the billion-dollar proprietary AI models built by Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
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