Privacy-Preserving Intelligence — Steve Korshakov, Bee (acq. Amazon)
Jul 20, 2026 · 15:53
Steve Korshakov, founder of Bee (acquired by Amazon), explains how his company built the 'most sensitive capture device on the market' with a guarantee that no one—not even Amazon—can read user data. Bee records everything a user says, generating about 10 million tokens per year, and within a week learns virtually everything about the person. To protect data, the encryption key never leaves the user's phone; the phone runs an attestation pipeline checking workloads against a public transparency log (Sigstore) before sharing the key with backends running in confidential compute. Keys in memory expire after seven days, and a two-tier signing system ensures no insider can ship code unnoticed: a separate Amazon privacy team holds signing keys hardcoded into apps. The entire system is only about 20,000 lines of memory-safe code, most of it verifying attestation, with no homegrown cryptography. Korshakov also discusses the challenges of moving from startup to Amazon, and his view on taming AI agents: sandboxing and not giving them the ability to cause harm.
