TL;DRSignal’s Whittaker warns AI chatbots are not sentient and that agentic systems like Copilot needing access to messages and credit cards are a backdoor.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker has warned that AI chatbots “are not your friends,” “are not conscious beings,” and “are not sentient interlocutors,” pushing back against the growing tendency of users to treat AI systems as trusted companions. The comments came in a Bloomberg interview published this week in which Whittaker laid out her case that the agentic AI vision promoted by companies like Microsoft amounts to a new form of surveillance infrastructure.
Whittaker, who has led the encrypted messaging nonprofit since September 2022, acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there” but drew a hard line at anything more substantive. “I don’t ask them questions,” she said.
“I’m very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don’t want the process of working through an idea to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that’s averaging what’s already out there,” she added.
Her sharpest criticism was directed at Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users would be able to let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping by eavesdropping on family group chats to determine who wants what. Whittaker methodically listed the access such a system would require: “my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address, my calendar.”
