Meta announced on Wednesday that it's introducing the ability to start "incognito" conversations with its Meta AI chatbot directly within WhatsApp. The company says these chats will be handled in a secure environment and remain invisible to anyone else. To start an incognito session, users simply tap a new icon while in one-on-one chats with Meta AI. The feature will also be available on the standalone Meta AI app. Incognito chats are set to roll out to WhatsApp and the Meta AI app over the next few months.

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According to Meta, these incognito conversations won't be saved, and messages will automatically disappear once the chat is closed. The session also ends if the user closes the app or locks their phone, at which point Meta AI loses the context of that particular conversation. "People are starting to use AI for everything, including some of their most private thoughts, whether that’s tackling financial or health questions, or for advice on how to respond to a tricky message from a friend or a colleague," the company stated.

Meta has been laying the groundwork for secure AI chats on WhatsApp for some time. Last year, it detailed its private processing infrastructure, designed to enable AI features without compromising end-to-end encryption. Since then, WhatsApp has introduced features like AI-powered message summaries that rely on this architecture. Newton-Rex noted that Meta previously used smaller models for its features, but the new incognito chat leverages the company's latest Muse Spark model, which was released last month.

Meta is already developing its next feature using this private processing infrastructure. Called Side Chat, it will allow users to invoke Meta AI within chats to ask questions and receive answers privately, without notifying or revealing the interaction to other participants. Currently, users must tag a message and ask the AI assistant a question, with the answer visible to everyone else in the chat. For private inquiries, users have to paste the text into a separate chat window.

Other AI services, such as ChatGPT and Claude, also offer incognito modes, and companies like DuckDuckGo and Proton have launched their own privacy-first chatbots. Meta's push toward private AI chats comes at a pivotal moment. Last month, Reuters cited lawyers who suggested that users' conversations with an AI chatbot could potentially be used against them in litigation.