- Report President Meredith Whittaker calls the dangers of AI agents
- The increased use of work tasks means “you are doing nothing of this”
- The tools have already raised confidentiality and security problems
The President of the Popular Signal messaging application warned AI agents with a significant risk for privacy and security, which “obsessed” media threshing around agentic AI.
Speaking in Sxsw, Meredith Whittaker argued that AI agents are marketed as a “magic genius bot” who thinks of several steps and performs tasks for users, so “your brain can sit in a pot, and you do nothing yourself”.
But that has a cost, and although the use of AI agents turns out to be popular, Whittaker stressed that there is a “real danger” with these robots, as they require significant access to user data.
Excessive access
Suppose you have asked an AI agent to reserve a concert for you and your friends – it should be a fairly simple task, but it means that the AI agent would need to access your browser, your credit card information, your calendar and even your messages to inform friends.
All this means that with a single task, the agent now has access to your financial details, your daily plans and your messages – which could be extremely damaging if the data fell into the wrong hands.
“It should be able to drive this on the whole of our system with something that looks like a root authorization, accessing each of these databases, probably in clear because there is no model to make it encrypted,” said Whittaker.
Messaging applications as a signal that have end-to-end encryption (E2EE) compromise the confidentiality of user messages if they were integrated with AI agents, even if it was just to send SMS to friends or summarize your incoming messages, she noted.
“It is almost certainly sent to a cloud server where it is treated and sent back,” adds Whittaker. “There is therefore a deep problem with security and privacy which haunts this media threw around agents, and which ultimately threatens to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the operating system layer by joining all these distinct services (and) blurring their data”, “
Via Techcrunch