The feature that makes Charlie “the most interesting thing in tech”
Charlie does a lot to keep people safe and empowered as they navigate the world of AI. But one particular thing stuck out to Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic.
"I've seen other people build data vaults, privacy, data on the blockchain, own your own privacy — I've been hearing that for a while," Thompson said from the VivaTech stage during his recent conversation with Inrupt’s founders. "I've never heard 'feed false data to an LLM to protect yourself,' which is just fabulous."
A few days later, Thompson gave the feature its own segment in his daily LinkedIn series spotlighting the most interesting thing happening in tech.
Thompson walked his audience through the mechanics: a personal vault holding a person's data, a personal AI assistant — Charlie — that decides what leaves the vault and in what form, and a deliberate, controlled inaccuracy introduced into whatever data does go out.
"The goal is that there's a trade-off between the accuracy of the answer and the helpfulness of the answer and the fidelity of the data," he explained. "If you screw up the data a little bit, can you get as good an answer with a little more privacy?”
The Bigger Conversation
Charlie’s ability to disguise personal details may have been the hook for Thompson. But on stage with CEO John Bruce and CTO Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he dug deep into the motivations — both consumer and commercial — for a different kind of AI assistant.
"What has gone wrong with the world that you're trying to fix?" Thompson asked first.
"It's no fun to be on the web anymore," Tim said. The web began as something anyone could build on. Today, most of it runs through a handful of platforms, and increasingly, through AI. "We've got disempowered people using AI, and we've lost control of our own data," he said.
Other speakers that day had talked about sovereignty at a national level — data sovereignty, AI sovereignty. Tim and John's focus is smaller, and more personal: the sovereignty of the individual.
"The essence of that is having access to your own data," John explained, "because that's the last thing we've got." The concern isn't hypothetical. As LLMs improve, they're becoming something closer to a second memory. Every preference, every query, every private detail typed into a chat window builds a profile the model — and the AI company behind it — will keep, indefinitely, in a place its owner can't see or revoke.
A Different Kind of Risk for Businesses
The conversation also turned to what's at stake for the organizations sitting on the sidelines of this shift. As individuals route more of their daily decisions through general-purpose AI assistants, institutions that have spent years building trusted, direct relationships with their customers are at risk. They’re being cut out of the loop; their role reduced to a data source for someone else's model.
John's view: that's a reason for institutions to act now, not a reason to resist AI altogether. "A lot of us are wayfinders now, not pathfinders," he said — nobody has a fixed map of where this ends, but the direction is clear enough to start moving. Organizations that offer their customers a trusted, consent-based way to use AI — rather than ceding that relationship to a platform — protect the relationship and the data at the same time.
Tompson pressed on an obvious tension: to avoid trusting a platform with your data, why would anyone trust Inrupt instead?
John's answer was direct: they wouldn't need to. Charlie isn't distributed by Inrupt directly to consumers. It's deployed by the institutions people already extend trust to — banks, telcos, retailers, and other organizations with long-standing, regulated relationships with their customers. "You trust your bank. You have to — they've got your money," John said. Charlie is built so that Inrupt itself never has visibility into the data moving through it; the trusted institution controls the vault, and the person controls consent.
It’s a win/win that helps trusted organizations and their customers work together for the benefit of both.
Interested in bringing Charlie to your organization's customers? Reach out below.
