Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned that AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude "are not your friends," "not conscious beings," and "not sentient interlocutors." The comments came during a broader Bloomberg interview covering policy, privacy, and Signal.
Whittaker acknowledged she uses AI tools "to format a document here and there," but said she does not ask them questions. "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 said.
Responding to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping, Whittaker described a scenario in which Copilot eavesdrops on the family group chat to determine gift recipients. She said that would require giving the system "access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address [and] my calendar."
Whittaker characterized that level of access as "a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services," adding that "in the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor."