Alternatives to ChatGPT

AI chatbots have exploded in recent years, and OpenAI's ChatGPT has become the default reference point. But every conversation you have with ChatGPT is logged and can be used to train future models. Your questions, your doubts, your ideas all become training material for a private company.

Alternatives exist, and some are completely open source — meaning you can run them on your own computer without sending anything to external servers. Local language models have made enormous strides, and on recent hardware the results can be surprisingly good. Other alternatives are online services that adopt more transparent privacy policies and don't use your conversations for training.

A middle ground: TEEs

Between local models and simply "trusted" services, there's a third option: chatbots that use TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments). Think of them as armoured cells built directly inside the server's processor. Your query travels encrypted until it enters that cell, is decrypted and processed only inside it, and the response comes back to you without the service operator ever being able to read it. This isn't a promise buried in the terms of service — it's a verifiable hardware property you can check for yourself.

Compared to a service that says "we don't log anything," a TEE provides a structural guarantee: even if they wanted to, the people hosting the chatbot cannot access the plaintext content of your conversations. That said, in 2025 a research attack called TEE.fail demonstrated that someone with direct physical access to a server can in theory intercept memory and spoof the guarantees. It's a real attack vector, but a narrow one: it requires physically touching a specific machine and isn't suited to mass surveillance of millions of people. For all practical purposes, a TEE-based chatbot remains dramatically safer than one that simply asks for your trust.

For those who want to dig deeper, here's an overview of confidential computing and here's an explanation of the architecture and its limits.

If you use AI for work or personal matters, the difference between a service that reads everything and one that respects your privacy is not a small thing. Below you'll find the options we consider most solid.