[totetsu]

> "It would need access to our browser, an ability to drive that. It would need our credit card information to pay for the tickets. It would need access to our calendar, everything we're doing, everyone we're meeting. It would need access to Signal to open and send that message to our friends," she said. "It would need to be able to drive that across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of those databases, probably in the clear because there's no model to do that encrypted."

Whittaker added that an AI agent powerful enough to do that would "almost certainly" process data off-device by sending it to a cloud server and back.

"So there's a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this sort of hype around agents, and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services, muddying their data, and doing things like undermining the privacy of your Signal messages," she said.

--Meredith Whittaker earlier this year.