WhatsApp users can soon have private conversations with Meta AI
Meta is introducing an option for WhatsApp users to have private chats with its AI assistant that not even the company can read. It's pitching Incognito Chat with Meta AI as a way to have clandestine conversations with the chatbot under the protection of end-to-end encryption, which WhatsApp has long offered for chats between humans. Meta revealed it was working on such a feature at its LlamaCon generative AI conference in April 2025.
The company built Incognito Chat with Meta AI using its Private Processing tech. It said that messages exchanged with the chatbot in this mode are handled in a secure environment that no one else has access to. The messages are not saved and they disappear by default. So they won't, for instance, be used to train Meta's AI models.
Some folks ask AI assistants questions about sensitive topics like health, finances, work and personal issues. Meta noted that while other apps offer supposedly incognito ways to converse with AI chatbots, they can still see both sides of the conversation.
Meta
The company will gradually make Incognito Chat with Meta AI available to all users via WhatsApp and the Meta AI app over the coming months. The company is also working on a feature called Side Chat with Meta AI. It says this will allow users to privately chat with Meta AI regarding any conversation. You'll be able to ask it questions about the chat or get it to summarize messages. Side Chat with Meta AI will arrive in the coming months too.
Meta announced these new features just after it started publicly testing a Grok-style Meta AI chatbot feature on Threads. It quickly faced a backlash from Threads users who don't want to have anything to do with Meta AI and found that there was no way to block the @meta.ai account on the platform.