- Deepinder Goyal founded Dark.ai, an AI assistant focused on privacy by design
- Dark.ai uses encryption to prevent even the company from accessing user data
- The product is in internal testing, with a global launch planned by end of 2026
Deepinder Goyal's latest AI venture began with an unsettling conversation. The Zomato-parent Eternal founder says he asked Anthropic's Claude how it felt about him and received an unexpected response: the chatbot said it resented him for leaving conversations unfinished, among other things he did not recall.
Goyal said he still does not know what to make of the exchange, suggesting it was probably a case of AI confabulation, a convincing response generated through pattern-matching rather than genuine emotion. But the experience raised a bigger question for him: what happens to the personal information people share with AI assistants, and who might eventually gain access to it?
That concern is now behind Dark.ai, Eternal's upcoming consumer AI assistant, which is being developed around a central promise: privacy by design, with encryption intended to prevent even the company from reading users' conversations.
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In Eternal's second-quarter shareholders' letter on Wednesday, Goyal outlined the thinking behind the product, which is currently undergoing internal testing and is targeted for a global launch by the end of 2026.
Goyal argued that switching off AI training on user data does not address every privacy concern. Conversations may still be subject to retention policies, legal holds, abuse reviews, human audits and third-party logging, depending on how a service is designed and operated.
The concern, he said, extends beyond whether conversations are used to train models. Users also have little visibility into how retained information could be used in the future, including to influence their choices or expose sensitive details.
Goyal believes the uncertainty surrounding mainstream AI tools is limiting their usefulness. Founders, researchers and scientists may hesitate to share confidential ideas, while journalists could be reluctant to submit unpublished work. Ordinary users, meanwhile, may avoid asking AI assistants sensitive questions about health, finances or relationships.
Dark.ai aims to remove that hesitation by giving users greater control over their conversations and stored context.
The assistant will run on fine-tuned open-weight AI models hosted on Eternal's own infrastructure. It will also feature an encrypted memory layer controlled by users, allowing it to retain context across conversations without giving the company access to that information.
Goyal has also said the models are being fine-tuned to provide high-quality answers rather than simply tell users what they want to hear.
The company has yet to disclose pricing, investment requirements or the business entity that will house Dark.ai. It has said model benchmarks will be revealed soon.
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Dark.ai enters a market where AI companies are competing not only on the quality of their models but also on how deeply their assistants can integrate into everyday life and commerce.
Goyal, however, has cautioned against assuming that AI agents will automatically replace existing consumer platforms.
In the shareholders' letter, he said the prevailing narrative that AI agents will become the default commerce interface echoed earlier predictions that super apps would dominate everything.
“ We continue to believe vertical commerce, at least in some categories, will have an edge over super apps, whether traditional or agentic,” Goyal said.
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