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Signal President Says AI Chatbots Are Not Friends or Sentient Beings
Meredith Whittaker warned against giving AI systems broad access to personal data and services. She contrasted limited formatting use with deeper integration proposed by Microsoft.
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Signal President Meredith Whittaker said AI chatbots are not friends, conscious beings, or sentient interlocutors during a June 20, 2026 interview with Bloomberg. Whittaker stated she uses AI tools only to format documents and does not ask them questions. She said she avoids systems that average existing information because they can foreclose or eclipse the process of working through an idea.
She responded to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all Christmas shopping in 2026. Whittaker described a system that would access credit cards, browsers, Signal messages, the ability to message siblings, home addresses, and calendars.
Whittaker said such access would give the system very pervasive reach across multiple applications and services.
In the context of Signal, she said it would constitute a kind of backdoor. @techcrunch reported the comments as part of a broader discussion on policy and privacy.
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