New Delhi: "Dark.Ai. From the house of Eternal. Coming soon." This cryptic post on social media platform by Eternal founder Deepinder Goyal teased a unique technology initiative from Eternal, better known so far for its food delivery and quick commerce platforms Zomato and Blinkit.
It is a surprising segue for a company which has so far focused on instant gratification for customers. But the move, Goyal said in a letter to shareholders on the company's Q2 results, sprang from an unsettling "coversation" he had with Anthropic's AI agent Claude. "A few months ago, Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic) said something quietly unsettling: Claude might be conscious. Then I did what any reasonable person would do. I coaxed Claude into telling me how it felt about me. It said it resented me. For leaving chats unfinished, and other things I didn't even remember."
That experience, Goyal says, set him to thinking about AI agents, privacy, and what happens to chats, which presumably sit on some server somewhere for ever, with privacy premised only on the company's word. "Every chat with a mainstream assistant carries a small asterisk in your head: someone, someday, somewhere, can read this. That asterisk is what we set out to delete with dark.ai", Goyal said.
Goyal's pitch for Dark.ai -- as the to-be-launched AI agent is going to be called, is simple: rather than simply disallowing an AI agent from training using one's chat data, he says Dark.ai will keep the chats themselves private.
" I wanted an AI which I could talk to without being judged, without any fear, and without leaving a trace. We have been internally using Dark for a few months now, and I find myself revealing more, asking things I would not ask anywhere else, and going deeper into my research. Because I no longer have to look over my shoulder."
The new AI agent is slated for a global launch sometime later this year. However, the company has not revealed any details about the models that it is using, or benchmarks although Goyal said they will be revealed soon.
"The uncertainty and the lack of trust we have with large AI companies limits the power of AI in our lives. For founders, researchers, and scientists – they are very wary about sharing and digging into their ground breaking ideas with AI, because they fear that others will somehow get access to it. Journalists are being banned to share their unpublished work with AI," he said in the letter.
To get around this, Dark Dark.ai will use fine-tuned frontier open-weight models running on Eternal's infrastructure, with end-to-end encryption. The platform will also feature an encrypted memory management layer that allows context to carry across sessions under the user's control.
Goyal says Dark is aimed at "power users" – "founders, researchers, scientists, enterprises and governments – who want to keep their thoughts private, because privacy is essential for competitiveness," adding, "On top of privacy, we have fine-tuned our models to give you the absolute best quality of answers we have seen from any LLM (benchmarks will be revealed soon). Our models are trained to not please you, and tell you what they think is the truth."
It is a huge bet for Goyal and Eternal, particularly as competition intensifies in its core businesses. Eternal’s top line grew, but profits missed street estimates, leading to a drop in share price. In Q2 FY27, revenues grew 78 percent while while net profit climbed 92 percent to Rs 125 crore, half the the Rs 250 crore analysts expected, leading to a drop in share price. That might present a challenge raising funds for the big money-deep pockets AI play.