March 6, 2026
Why choose the lesser of two AI evils when a third way might be good?
A lot of people have been deleting their ChatGPT accounts in favour Claude. It’s their way of choosing sides in the controversy surrounding contracts with the U.S. government.
I was initially tempted to do the same thing until I concluded that Anthropic, the company that runs Claude, is motivated by greed every bit as much as OpenAI.
My first thought was to try Ecosia’s version of AI. I already use Ecosia for search, and like the idea that they use their revenue to fund environmental causes.
But then it occurred to me that Ecosia is very likely using the services of other companies for its AI responses. Sure enough, it pays OpenAI and Google for their APIs — application programming interfaces that allow them to tap into those companies’ models.
They somewhat mitigate this dependency by framing their answers in an environmentally conscious manner. For example, they they tried very hard to make lab-grown meat seem like a good thing — not creepy at all! But still, I wanted to keep looking.
I’m currently trying out Lumo from Proton. They rely completely on open source large language models (LLMs), with no connections at all to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and the rest of the proprietary bunch.
But open source LLMs don’t come from nowhere. When asked, Lumo cited these contributors: NeMo, OpenHands, OLMO 2, GPT‑OSS, Qwen, Ernie 4.5 VL, Apertus, Kimi K2.
Of these, two might be a bit shady. OpenHands is a Meta project and Qwen is based in China. Lumi promises complete privacy, though, so there should be no worries about your data making its way to the owner of Facebook or the Chinese government.
I have a feeling that many of the switchers to Claude were people who use it for programming. I don’t do much coding these days, but when I do, I might fall back to Claude.
Lumo was able to show me how to centre a div, and it had some good ideas about how to use an app to update a web page. I’m not sure at what point I would need to go for the subscription-based Lumo+ if I really wanted to up my reliance on it for coding.
If nothing else, it’s a worthy experiment.