Signal President Meredith Whittaker Warns AI Chatbots "Are Not Your Friends"

In a Bloomberg interview, Signal President Meredith Whittaker pushed back on the anthropomorphization of AI chatbots, stating flatly: "These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors." She acknowledged using AI tools occasionally to format documents, but said she avoids asking them questions, wary of letting a system that "averages what's already out there" short-circuit her own thinking.

Whittaker also took aim at Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's vision of Copilot handling users' Christmas shopping by monitoring family group chats — pointing out that the scenario requires handing over access to credit cards, browsers, messaging apps, home addresses, and calendars. In the context of Signal specifically, she argued such integration "would constitute a kind of a backdoor."