Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned that AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are not friends or conscious beings, cautioning against granting them pervasive access to personal data. She criticized Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's vision of AI handling tasks like Christmas shopping, arguing it would create a backdoor into services like Signal.

Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, “These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.” Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-meredith-whittaker-weekend-interview/ about policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools “to format a document here and there,” but insisted, “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.” As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-mustafa-suleyman-weekend-interview/ that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued this scenario — where Copilot is eavesdropping on the family group chat to determine who wants want — means giving it “access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address and my calendar.” “What you’ve just described is a system with very pervasive access across multiple applications and services,” Whittaker said. “In the context of Signal, it would constitute a kind of a backdoor.”