Can't Run Local AI. What Are My Privacy Respecting Alternatives?

Questions
1

My situation:

  • I use Microsoft Copilot in Teams at work (company account). My IT department can see everything I chat about.
  • I only have a personal M1 Mac with 8GB RAM.
  • Eventually I’d also like to switch from work Copilot to a different AI that respects my privacy better.

The problem:

  • I can’t use work Copilot for personal stuff—IT will see it.
  • My Mac isn’t powerful enough to run a really capable AI locally.
  • I don’t want companies training their AI on my personal conversations or keeping them forever.

What I’m looking for:

2

I would say Proton Lumo or Duck.ai.

3

And which one is the better option?

I use Proton for email already, but I can see Duck.ai has Claude. Haven’t tried Lumo.

And is there anything as advanced as Copilot yet? Where it remembers who you are and previous conversations? I find that useful so I don’t have to start over in every chat…

4

Both Lumo and Duck.ai have chat history.
Try both and see which one fits better for you, but probably Lumo should be the favorite.

5

I’d suggest using OpenRouter via something like BoltAI. Turn on Zero Data Retention (ZDR) in your account, and you can use frontier models hosted on Azure, AWS, etc. with additional privacy measures (e.g., no training on your data). Plenty of options. Duck.ai is also great, but does something similar to OpenRouter since they give “anonymous” access to models like GPT Luna.

6

It does sound a bit advanced for me. But I appreciate the suggestions and maybe they will still help someone else.

I may settle on Duck AI as Lumo is limited in what it can do and give back.

7

Lumo seems better to me because they host it themselves and proton is trustworthy. Last I check duck.ai was an anonymizing layer but maybe they are using zdr or something now but still I would trust Proton to use private computing more than a big tech.

8

Couple of others not already mentioned - maple, ppq.ai, and venice. API access for your bot and various levels of privacy and payment options to suit your needs. Hope that helps. Happy hunting.

9

If you would consider Duck.ai, I recommend choosing either these models; gemma and gpt-oss, both of which passes through Tinfoil’s zero-visibility (through a TEE) so that not even the company can see the prompts and generated outputs.