Signal President Warns Against Anthropomorphizing AI
In a wide-ranging 2026 interview with Bloomberg, Signal President Meredith Whittaker issued a sharp reminder about the nature of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors,” she stated bluntly when asked about the privacy implications of such tools.
Balancing Utility and Skepticism
Whittaker, who has become one of the most prominent voices in digital privacy, acknowledged that she occasionally uses AI tools “to format a document here and there.” However, she drew a clear line in her personal use: “I don’t ask them questions. 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.”
The Risk of ‘Pervasive Access’
The interview also touched on a vision outlined by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who predicted that by 2026, users would trust Microsoft Copilot to handle tasks like holiday shopping. Whittaker strongly pushed back, describing a nightmare scenario where Copilot monitors family group chats and gains intimate access to users’ lives.
“That means giving it access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address, my calendar,” she said. “What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services. In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.”
Whittaker’s comments serve as a critical counterpoint to the tech industry’s growing push for deeply integrated AI assistants, especially as 2026 sees increasing calls for AI regulation and user data protection.
via TechCrunch AI