Signal's Meredith Whittaker warns AI chatbots aren't friends, act as backdoors

Signal President Meredith Whittaker told Bloomberg that AI chatbots are “not your friends, not conscious beings, not sentient interlocutors.” She said she only uses generative AI to format documents and avoids asking them questions, stressing that reliance on such tools could “foreclose” her own thinking.

Whittaker warned that a scenario proposed by Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman – where Copilot listens to family group chats to handle Christmas‑gift purchases – would require the system to access a user's credit‑card details, web browser, Signal app, contacts, home address and calendar. She described this as “a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services” that would amount to a “backdoor” for Signal’s end‑to‑end encryption.

She added that granting such cross‑application privileges threatens the privacy guarantees of encrypted messaging and indicated Signal would rather leave markets such as the EU than compromise its cryptographic protections.