Signal president Meredith Whittaker is warning users to keep a hard boundary between AI chatbots and real relationships. Her message is blunt: chatbots are not friends, conscious beings, or sentient interlocutors.
The warning lands as consumer AI companies increasingly market assistants with warmer voices, memory, and emotionally fluent behavior. That creates product stickiness, but it also raises concerns about dependency, privacy, and whether users understand what systems are doing with their data.
For builders, the point is not just philosophical. Interface choices can shape trust, and trust can become a safety issue when people share sensitive information or outsource judgment to systems optimized for engagement.