Privacy
What is the most private AI chat?
The most private AI chat is one that never learns who you are: no account, no stored history, and nothing written to disk once the answer is sent. By that standard the mainstream assistants — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Meta AI — are not private, because all four require a sign-in that ties every message to a durable identity.
Four questions that settle it
Does it require an account? An account is an identity, and an identity is what turns a conversation into a record about a person. Everything else is downstream of this one.
Is the conversation stored after it is answered? "We delete it after 30 days" is a retention policy, not privacy — it means there is something to hand over for thirty days.
Does the provider behind it retain the prompt? Most chat products are a thin layer over someone else's model. If that provider keeps prompts, the front end's promise is decoration.
Can the promise be checked, or only believed? A claim you cannot verify is a marketing line. Closing the tab and finding no history is a check you can run yourself in ten seconds.
How the popular assistants score
ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot all require sign-in, keep conversation history by default, and attach it to an account you cannot fully separate from your identity. Turning history off changes what you see, not what exists.
DuckDuckGo's Duck.ai is the honourable exception in the mainstream: no account, and it states that chats are not used for training. It is also deliberately limited — a small set of models, no images, no video, and a refusal profile inherited from the model vendors.
Local models — Ollama, LM Studio, GPT4All — are genuinely the most private thing available, because nothing leaves your machine. The cost is a capable GPU, setup time, and a quality ceiling well below a hosted frontier model.
Where nokeep sits
nokeep takes the no-account position and pushes it further than a chat window: there is no sign-up at all, conversations live in your tab and die with it, and every engine behind it runs under a no-retention agreement — audited daily, because a provider can silently move a model to a cheaper tier that keeps prompts.
It is not the most private option that exists. A model running on your own hardware is, and always will be. nokeep is the most private option that still answers like a frontier model, with images and video, and asks nothing of you to start.
Asked before you asked
Is any hosted AI chat truly private?
Not in the absolute sense — the text has to reach a machine that is not yours to be answered. What varies is whether that machine keeps it, whether it is tied to your identity, and whether anyone can check. A hosted service with no account and a no-retention agreement is the strongest form available without running the model yourself.
Does incognito mode make ChatGPT private?
No. Private browsing hides the session from other people using your computer. It changes nothing on the server, where the account and its history live.
What should I check before trusting a privacy claim?
Whether an account is required, whether history survives closing the tab, and what the underlying provider retains. The third is where most claims quietly fail, because the front end promises something its supplier never agreed to.