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Think about what you type into an AI chatbot at 11 p.m.: a medical question, a letter from a debt collector, a draft of a difficult message to your boss. Those conversations can say more about you than a search query ever could. So it's worth knowing what happens to them after you hit send.
Why your chats are a privacy question
When you use most AI services, your conversation travels to a company's servers, where it is processed and usually stored. Anyone with access to those servers, including the company itself, may be able to read it. Brave's announcement points out that conversations can also be used to train future models, handed over in legal cases, or exposed through security bugs. These are risks the company describes in general terms, not promises about any specific service.
Two terms help here:
- Encryption scrambles your text so only someone holding the right key can read it. Think of it as a locked box.
- End-to-end encryption means the box is locked on your device and only opened at the intended destination.
What Brave's Leo is doing
Brave describes Leo, the AI assistant built into its browser, as offering privacy you can verify. According to Brave, each prompt is encrypted on your device before it leaves, and only a special protected area on a server can unlock it. That protected area is called a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which you can picture as a sealed room inside a computer that even its operator cannot peek into.
Brave also says a proxy (a middleman service) called its AI Gateway hides your IP address, which is the number that identifies your internet connection, from the AI provider. The model Leo uses runs inside that protected room. Brave says the setup is designed so that neither Brave nor the AI provider can see your prompts or the answers. Brave says these features are available now in its Release, Beta and Nightly versions of the browser.
What DuckDuckGo's shared chats do
DuckDuckGo's Duck.ai now lets you create a link to a chat. Anyone who opens the link can read it, continue it or save their own copy, and they don't need an account. Several things are built in, according to DuckDuckGo:
- The chat is encrypted on your device before it's uploaded.
- The key that unlocks it sits in the part of the link after the
#, which browsers normally don't send to servers. - Shared pages are blocked from search engines, and links are long and random so they can't be guessed.
- Links expire after 48 hours by default. You can choose 1, 2, 7 or 30 days, or delete a link early.
DuckDuckGo also points out a limit: once someone reads your shared chat, no technology can stop them from saving it or passing it on.
Wrap-up
Both announcements show AI companies trying to keep conversations private by design, not just by promise. Brave describes encryption and hardware protection for Leo, and DuckDuckGo describes encrypted, expiring share links for Duck.ai. Neither removes every risk, and both companies say so. Your best next step today is simple: open the privacy or data section of the AI tool you use most and find out how long it keeps your chats.