Signal Chief Warns That AI Chatbots Are Not Friends

She says giving assistants broad access to apps would create privacy backdoors that let companies store and mine conversations for commercial use.

Overview

Meredith Whittaker told Bloomberg in comments reported June 20–21 that AI chatbots are not conscious or sentient and should not be treated as friends or substitutes for human thinking.
She said systems that can act across services would need access to items like credit cards, browsers, messaging apps, calendars and addresses and that in Signal’s case such access would amount to a backdoor into private conversations.
Whittaker described her own use of AI as strictly limited to small tasks such as formatting documents and said she avoids asking models to do her thinking or write for her.
She warned that the companies running assistants control whether chats are stored or mined and that those firms could tune responses to serve advertisers or partners.
Her remarks come as tech firms pursue deeper assistant integration and ad or partner ties, a trend that raises fresh questions about data access, consent and how messaging apps preserve user privacy.