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