How To Think About End-To-End Encryption and AI (NYU / Cornell, 2025)

What it is

A free 2025 paper by Mallory Knodel, Sunoo Park, Kyunghyun Cho and colleagues at NYU and Cornell examining whether AI assistants and end-to-end encryption can honestly coexist. It covers two cases — putting an AI assistant inside an encrypted app, and training models on encrypted data — sets out where each breaks the security promise encryption makes, works through the legal consequences when a provider keeps saying "end-to-end encrypted" anyway, and ends with concrete recommendations on default settings, consent and what providers may truthfully claim.

Why I recommend it

Read the recommendations section even if you skip the cryptography. It gives you the exact questions to put to any product that advertises both an AI helper and private messaging — where does the processing happen, what is the default, and what were you actually asked to agree to. Two flags: it is posted to a preprint archive, so it has not been through journal peer review, and the authors published plain-language summaries on the NYU DeTaIL Lab blog and Tech Policy Press if the full paper is heavy going.

Topics

#ai ethics #ai privacy #consent #cornell #cryptography #data protection #end-to-end encryption #nyu #research #research paper #technology ethics #trusted execution environment

Added Sep 23, 2026 · 0 opens