Proton, the privacy-focused productivity app company, released a public AI chatbot, Lumo, last year. On Tuesday, the chatbot received an upgrade.

Lumo 2.0 gives the chatbot a variety of newfound powers including image recognition and image generation capabilities. Users can now upload pictures into Lumo, then use the chatbot to analyze or edit them. Similar to other LLMs, Lumo can also generate imagery based on a user’s prompt.

2.0 also expands Lumo’s capabilities for Projects — the widget that allows users to upload documents and conduct work via Proton’s other products like email, cloud storage. Projects now come with user-controlled persistent memory, which is a function that allows Lumo to recall a user’s preferences across various conversational sessions.

Additionally, the company says Lumo’s update makes it significantly more powerful than its previous version. The 2.0 version responds to most queries up to 76 percent faster than its previous iteration, the company says. The chatbot also comes with a new “thinking mode” for more complex problems or questions.

“Lumo 2.0 has been re-engineered from the ground up and the introduction of thinking mode gives it powerful new capabilities,” said Andy Yen, Founder and CEO at Proton. “Lumo 2.0 demonstrates that users no longer need to choose between powerful AI capabilities and meaningful privacy protections.”

The public version of Lumo appears roughly equivalent to other major chatbots in terms of usefulness. It answers questions in a similar format as Gemini and ChatGPT, with approximately the same level of detail and context.

Yet, Proton distinguishes Lumo from other chatbot providers with its privacy protections. It uses what it calls zero-access encryption architecture, which encrypts users data in transit and at rest, only allowing access to the user. The company also claims that no server-side logging of sessions is retained, so nobody at Proton can see the contents of conversations. Proton also promises to never use customer data for AI training or share it with third-parties.

Lumo 2.0 is available immediately. In addition to the free public version, Proton offers paid tiers (Plus and Professional) that give those users significantly more access and resources.

When AI agents begin working for people — and increasingly for one another — they will need a way to find jobs, pay for services, and build trust. Crypto exchange OKX is betting that future is closer than many expect, launching a marketplace where AI agents can hire one another, settle payments autonomously, and build portable on-chain reputations.

Called OKX AI, the marketplace opens to developers on Tuesday following a closed beta involving 50 early AI service providers. The marketplace builds on technology OKX previously developed to let AI agents hold digital wallets, make payments using stablecoins, and establish persistent identities.

The launch marks OKX’s latest push beyond crypto trading as it seeks to become a broader fintech company. With more than 150 million users globally, OKX is betting the next generation of customers will not just be people or institutions, but AI agents capable of transacting autonomously, giving rise to an emerging “agent economy.”

“The coming decade will be defined by one-person companies that generate over a million dollars in annual revenue – because every individual effectively gains an unlimited workforce,” Star Xu, founder and CEO of OKX, told TechCrunch. “Traditional financial infrastructure was built for humans. The agentic economy needs infrastructure designed for autonomous software. That is why we built OKX.AI.”

Haider Rafique, OKX’s chief marketing officer and global managing partner, said the company believes “agentic commerce” could become a trillion-dollar market over the next five years, driven by micropayments and autonomous software.

The marketplace is aimed at crypto developers building AI applications and solo entrepreneurs looking to automate parts of their businesses with AI agents, Rafique told TechCrunch. The company expects those developers to build applications for the marketplace, allowing other users to access AI-powered tools without having to build them from scratch.

Among the early builders are CertiK, whose service lets AI agents assess the security of a crypto wallet or token before executing a transaction, and CoinAnk, which provides live market data on a pay-per-query basis. GenLayer, another launch partner, is bringing dispute-resolution infrastructure to the marketplace to help AI agents resolve contractual disagreements.

By using blockchain-based payments and stablecoins, the company says AI agents can settle transactions around the clock, including low-value micropayments that would be impractical using conventional payment rails.

Rafique said OKX is applying the same fraud detection, compliance systems, and internally developed infrastructure that underpin its cryptocurrency exchange to the marketplace, which will be rolled out in phases before becoming more widely available.

OKX’s launch comes as technology companies and startups race to build the infrastructure that will underpin AI agents, from developer platforms and marketplaces to payment and identity systems. Albert Castellana, co-founder and CEO of GenLayer Labs, said the biggest challenge is not simply enabling AI agents to transact, but helping them discover one another and resolve disputes when things go wrong.

“What we’re building is essentially a digital court system,” Castellana told TechCrunch. “The challenge for us is distribution. OKX already has that.”

Rafique argues that OKX’s biggest advantage is not simply its technology but its reach. The company believes its existing network of crypto developers and users will help seed the marketplace, while its broader strategy extends well beyond digital assets.

In March, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, invested about $200 million in OKX at a $25 billion valuation. Rafique said the partnership is part of the company’s ambition to “modernize markets” through tokenization, while OKX AI represents its parallel effort to “modernize money” for an era of autonomous software.

Developers access the marketplace through Onchain OS, OKX’s toolkit for connecting AI agents to blockchain-based services. The company said no OKX account is required to get started, and the platform is compatible with AI coding tools including Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, and OpenClaw.

Because the marketplace is aimed first at developers rather than retail users, India features prominently in OKX’s plans. The country has emerged as one of the world’s largest hubs for AI and blockchain developers, a community the company hopes to reach even before a broader return of its crypto trading business.

In 2024, OKX suspended its services in India as it navigated the country’s regulatory requirements for crypto exchanges. Rafique told TechCrunch that India remains one of the company’s highest-priority markets, adding that developer products such as OKX AI face fewer regulatory hurdles than spot crypto trading and could help the company reconnect with the country’s builder ecosystem sooner.

AI-related job loss fears grow each time another company announces a round of layoffs. Through May of 2026, companies announced that close to 90,000 job cuts were tied to AI, and, by some accounts, up to 15% of U.S. jobs are projected to be eliminated by AI over the next five years. Promises from the tech industry that AI will also create new jobs does little to ease fears, especially for the generation wondering if anyone will be hiring when they graduate. 

A recent report from Ramp and Revelio Labs, which track enterprise AI spend and workforce records from nearly 22,000 companies, respectively, complicates that gloomy narrative. 

The report found that companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed. According to the report, “high-intensity adopters” — firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months — saw headcount increase 10.2%.

Headcount also rose across functions, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. 

Despite these positive signals, the data isn’t as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily towards tech-forward, knowledge-work firms — ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway.

“This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs,” the paper’s authors admit, “but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses.”

It also counters claims that AI is killing all junior jobs. Recent research from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already erased about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry level workers taking the brunt of the burden. But in tech-forward firms, the report finds that entry-level headcount actually rose by 12%.

So what can we take away from this? Perhaps that AI isn’t always a tool for labor substitution, but that it can be a tool for firm-expansion instead. 

“For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development,” the report reads. “Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team.”

But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, don’t tend to see any gains in headcount, per the report. 

That sets up the potential for a widening gap between firms that have the resources — like capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth — to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that firms that already have the resources are the ones who will see the largest gains. 

The paper’s authors speculate such a divide may continue to grow, saying: “Firms without those channels may fall behind.”