Yeah the article is mostly legit points that if your contacting the chatpot in China it is harvesting your data. Just like if you contact open AI or copilot or Claude or Gemini they're all collecting all of your data.

I do find it somewhat strange that they only talk about deep-seek hosting models.

It's absolutely trivial just to download the models run locally yourself and you're not giving any data back to them. I would think that proton would be all over that for a privacy scenario.

We actually it seems quite fair-ish 🤷

AI has the potential to be a truly revolutionary development, one that could drive advancement for centuries. But it must be done correctly. These companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue, and yet they violated our privacy and are training their tools using our data without our permission. Recent history shows we must act now if we’re to avoid an even worse version of surveillance capitalism.

Also from 2023 : https://proton.me/blog/ai-gdpr

It's not active running code that can affect a system in any meaningful way. It's a model. It's like a complex series of partitioned data that is loaded and sorted through. Nothing more. It's been open sourced and poured through, and it's just a model.