Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI

Summary

Hello HN! We’re Tanya, Sacha, Jules and Nate from Tinfoil: https://tinfoil.sh. We host models and AI workloads on the cloud while guaranteeing zero data access and retention. This lets us run open-source LLMs like Llama, or Deepseek R1 on cloud GPUs without you having to trust us—or any cloud provider—with private data.Since AI performs better the more context you give it, we think solving AI privacy will unlock more valuable AI applications, just how TLS on the Internet enabled e-commerce to flourish knowing that your credit card info wouldn't be stolen by someone sniffing internet packets.We come from backgrounds in cryptography, security, and infrastructure. Jules did his PhD in trusted hardware and confidential computing at MIT, and worked with NVIDIA and Microsoft Research on the same, Sacha did his PhD in privacy-preserving cryptography at MIT, Nate worked on privacy tech like Tor, and I (Tanya) was on Cloudflare's cryptography team. We were unsatisfied with band-aid techniques like PII redaction (which is actually undesirable in some cases like AI personal assistants) or “pinky promise” security through legal contracts like DPAs. We wanted a real solution that replaced trust with provable security.Running models locally or on-prem is an option, but can be expensive and inconvenient. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is not practical for LLM inference for the foreseeable future. The next best option is using secure enclaves: a secure environment on the chip that no other software running on the host machine can access. This lets us perform LLM inference in the cloud while being able to prove that no one, not even Tinfoil or the cloud provider, can access the data. And because these security mechanisms are implemented in hardware, there is minimal performance overhead.Even though we (Tinfoil) control the host machine, we do not have any visibility into the data processed inside of the enclave. At a high level, a secure enclave is a set of cores that are reserv...