Signal warns AI chatbots are not your friends

TechCrunch reported that Signal president Meredith Whittaker pushed back on the idea that AI chatbots should be treated like friends or sentient interlocutors. In a Bloomberg interview cited by TechCrunch, she said she uses AI only lightly and avoids outsourcing her own thinking and writing to systems that average what is already online. Whittaker also warned that agentic scenarios such as letting Copilot handle family gift shopping would require access to payments, browser data, private messages, home addresses, calendars, and messaging privileges. In Signal's context, she argued, that level of cross-app access would amount to a backdoor.

Key details: Published June 20, 2026 at 20:32 UTC, Whittaker warned users not to treat AI chatbots as friends or sentient beings, She raised privacy concerns about agents that can access payments, calendars, browsers, and private chats, The comments came in a broader Bloomberg interview about Signal, privacy, and AI policy.

Why it matters: Agentic AI becomes much riskier when assistants need access to private chats, payments, and calendars, so Signal's warning is a concrete privacy check on the consumer-agent pitch.