In March of this year, Meredith Whittaker was at her kitchen table in Paris when Signal, the encrypted messaging service she runs, suddenly became an international headline. A colleague sent their group chat the story ricocheting across the globe: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
Of course, you know the rest: In the piece, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how he’d been added to a Signal chat about an upcoming military operation in Yemen. Over the following days and weeks, the incident would become known as “SignalGate”—and created a legitimate risk that the fallout would cause people to question Signal’s security, instead of pointing their fingers at the profoundly dubious op-sec of senior-level Trump officials.
That never happened. In fact, Signal’s user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It’s growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when “people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important.”
On this week’s episode of The Big Interview, I talked to Whittaker, who also cofounded the AI Now Institute, about the aftermath of SignalGate, the trajectory of artificial intelligence, and the tech industry’s current relationship with politics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Meredith Whittaker, welcome to The Big Interview.
MEREDITH WHITTAKER: Nice to see you, Katie.
Nice to see you, too. Brace yourself, we always start these conversations with a little warmup, so I’m going to ask you some very fast questions. Ready?
I am.
OK. Mountains or beach?
Mountains.
What’s the most over-hyped AI buzzword right now?
Agent.
I knew you were gonna say that. What’s the weirdest AI application you’ve ever seen?
A chatbot that pretends to be your friend.
That is weird.
Right?
Weirder every day. If Signal had a mascot, what would it be?
We would never tell you.
What emoji best sums up your philosophy on privacy?
The ghost emoji.
Nice. More secure: handwritten letters or encrypted texts?
Handwritten letters.
Coffee order: simple or complicated?
Simple.
She’s telling the truth. She’s drinking what looks like a very basic coffee right now. If you weren’t working in tech, what would you be doing? What’s your alternate career path?
A poet.
Love that. Someone asked me that once. I don’t wanna name-drop, but it was [New Yorker editor] David Remnick, in a job interview, and I said massage therapist. He was like, “What is wrong with you?”
He’s like, hired.
Yikes. Wow.
I can make that joke. I’m not in your industry.
It’s fine. I’m blushing. OK, so let’s talk a little bit about you so that I can stop talking about that very awkward interview I did with David Remnick.
Interestingly, we don’t know a lot about the early life of Meredith, which I realize is on purpose. You’ve talked about how you’ve decided to keep your personal life private. You decided that at a very early age. If only more people were so careful. Tell me about that decision.
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