Open to Debate: should we trust AI agents with our information?

Did we start trusting agents with our information or are we just kind of using them because we need to, right? We are eating the seed corn of our cybersecurity when we install these things. in the name of convenience without thinking through the perilous architectures that we have used to create them. Maybe they're not as technically sophisticated, but for the average person, being able to file and register and opt out of all the data brokers with a six-word prompt is pretty powerful privacy protection. And we're gonna learn how to improve these products by using them. Not by standing back and letting people who don't care about privacy build them. The promise of artificial intelligence agents and assistants is that they can go out into the world and complete tasks and check things off our to-do lists. They can book our travel, they can make dinner reservations, they can schedule meetings. But it's handing over our credit cards and our passwords and basically our whole life to an anonymous, autonomous agent

Too risky. Welcome to Open to Debate. I'm John Donben, and today a debate around those risks. We did this one on stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. That's an annual event held in San Francisco that brings together business leaders. They were our partner for this episode, and the question that was debated, should we stop trusting AI agents with our information? Our debaters included somebody who has long been a voice on the issue of privacy. That's Meredith Whitaker of Signal. She argued not to trust, and challenging her. Neil Chilson. He's a lawyer, a computer scientist, and author who heads up AI policy at the Abundance Institute. And we had a guest moderator for this one, Jeff Berman, a former public defender turned entrepreneur who heads up the media company that produces the summit. And after the debate, Meredith and Neil will join me in the podcast studio.

For a debrief. Uh with us today. Meredith Whitaker, the president of S Signal, and Neil Chilson, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute. Um we have a tight clock. I'll remind you that uh the resolution on the table is should we stop trusting AI agents with our information. Three minute opening statements for each of you. Meredith, we'll start with you.

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