Meet Thaura: An Ethical, Privacy-First Alternative to Big Tech AI

AI is everywhere, thanks largely to Big Tech. But when two self-taught Syrian brothers left their corporate tech roles in Germany, they weren’t trying to add yet another model to the pile. They were focused on a more urgent question: Why is there still no ethical alternative to the AI systems dominating the world?

Their answer is Thaura, a privacy-first, values-driven AI platform that has launched, positioning itself not as a “better ChatGPT” but as a fundamentally different kind of system built around ethics, digital rights, and political clarity.

And it arrives at a moment when the global AI industry is confronting unprecedented criticism over surveillance, data extraction, political censorship, and corporate power.

A Syrian Origin Story in a German Tech Landscape

Thaura was founded by brothers Hani and Said Chihabi, who fled to Europe from Syria shortly before the revolution. Neither went through formal computer science education. Both taught themselves programming through YouTube and AI tools.

“We were never really into tech,” Hani told Barakah Insider. “We got into it because we’re living in a digital era, and we knew we could have an impact with tech. We just had to teach ourselves everything.”

But once inside the German corporate system, they realised the work they were doing, building systems for pharmaceutical clients, contradicted their own ethical commitments.

“It was not going hand in hand with the reason why we started with technology,” Hani said. “Especially with what was going on in Palestine and Syria… we had the same call to do something.”

That call led to Thaura, Arabic for revolution. Not a political uprising, but a challenge to technological imperialism.

Why Thaura Exists

The founders’ starting point was simple: encrypted messaging has Signal; search has DuckDuckGo; browser has Brave; but AI, the most intimate technology of all, had no ethical counterweight.

“There was no AI alternative,” Hani said. “My aunt talks to AI more than anyone I know. And I feel like this is terrible because ChatGPT doesn’t have an ethical framework. And that is scary.”

Thaura’s mission: Build an AI that doesn’t exploit users, doesn’t surveil them, and doesn’t sanitise political realities.

Unlike corporate AI developers, Thaura’s ethical position is explicit and culturally grounded. Its core commitments include never training on user data, avoiding all surveillance, behavioural tracking and profiling, refusing military contracts, maintaining an explicit stance of solidarity with Palestine and other marginalised communities, and storing data on its own GDPR-compliant backend servers with AES-256 encryption and zero user-data retention.

This makes Thaura one of the few AI platforms openly rejecting both Big Tech business models and political bias.

The Tech Behind Thaura

Thaura is powered by GLM-4.5 Air, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model. It’s a 100B-parameter model, but only 12B parameters activate per prompt, making it drastically more energy-efficient.

Hani breaks it down: “Instead of a massive brain that fires everything every time you ask anything, GLM 4.5 Air intelligently decides what part of its brain to use. This is how we tackle sustainability.”

Hani claims that his platform's energy savings are about 93% more efficient than Big Tech models, a sharp contrast to trillion-parameter giants like GPT-5.

Thaura currently supports web search, vision and image inputs, document uploads, voice mode, Claude-style “artifacts” for visualised outputs, powered by GLM-4.5 Air’s self-reflective reasoning abilities.

It runs its models through an independent inference provider that operates its own infrastructure rather than relying on big cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google, and does not store any user data. To mitigate the limitations of using a pre-trained open-source model, they implement their own “guardrails” through manually written ethical system prompts, partnerships with pro-Palestine data projects, and reference datasets designed to ensure factual, unsanitized responses on political and humanitarian topics.

Bootstrapped and pro-Palestine

Financially, Thaura is bootstrapped, carefully avoiding equity funding to prevent external influence. Despite investor interest, Hani insists, “We don’t want anyone shifting our vision. This goal is about providing ethical AI to everyone, not benefiting a few.”

The growth strategy hinges heavily on an ethics-focused community, leveraging credibility from niche groups supportive of their values, especially pro-Palestine advocates. “Once we establish ourselves in this sector, we will expand to other communities, including open source and sustainability advocates.”

Thaura’s current infrastructure can support up to 100,000 active users, and the team plans to scale to that gradually.

“We are building not just an AI, but an ethical revolution, a tool that respects human dignity, amplifies silenced voices, and stands firmly against exploitation,” Hani reflects.

For users seeking an AI with a conscience, one that respects privacy, resists surveillance, and champions marginalised communities, Thaura opens a new path forward in ethical artificial intelligence.