https://coywolf.com/news/productivity/signal-president-and-vp-warn-agentic-ai-is-insecure-unreliable-and-a-surveillance-nightmare/ Coywolf Helping you adapt and thrive online since 2017 --------------------------------------------------------------------- * Membership * News * Guides * Reviews * Newsletter * Podcast 'Signal' President and VP warn agentic AI is insecure, unreliable, and a surveillance nightmare With agentic AI embedded at the OS level, databases storing entire digital lives accessible to malware, tasks whose reliability quickly breaks down at each step, and being opted-in without consent, Signal leadership is sounding the alarm for the industry to pull back until threats can be mitigated. Headshot for Jon Henshaw By Jon Henshaw in Productivity News Jan 11, 2026 (Last updated on Jan 12, 2026) At the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg, Germany, Signal President Meredith Whittaker and VP of Strategy and Global Affairs Udbhav Tiwari gave a presentation titled AI Agent, AI Spy. In it, they shared the many vulnerabilities and concerns they have about how agentic AI is being implemented, the very real threat it's bringing to enterprise companies, and how they recommend the industry change to mitigate a disaster in the making. "AI Agent, AI Spy" presented by Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari at 39C3 - CC BY 4.0 A key component of AI agents is that they must know enough about you and have access to sensitive data so that they can autonomously take actions on your behalf, such as making purchases, scheduling events, and responding to messages. However, the way AI agents are being implemented is making them insecure, unreliable, and open to surveillance. How AI agents are vulnerable to threats Microsoft is trying to bring agentic AI to its Windows 11 users via Recall. Recall takes a screenshot of your screen every few seconds, OCRs the text, and does semantic analysis of the context and actions. It then creates a forensic dossier of everything you do into a single database on your computer. The database includes a precise timeline of actions, full raw text (via OCR), dwell time, and focus on specific apps and actions. Additionally, it assigns topics to specific activities. Tiwari says the problem with this approach is that it doesn't mitigate the threat of malware (via online attacks) and indirect (hidden) prompt injection attacks, which can all gain access to the database. These vulnerabilities subsequently circumvent end-to-end encryption (E2EE), prompting Signal to add a flag in its app to prevent its screen from being recorded, but Tiwari says that's not a reliable or long-term solution. Why complex agentic tasks aren't reliable Whittaker emphasized that agentic AI isn't just intrusive and vulnerable to threats; it's also unreliable. She said AI agents are probabilistic, not deterministic, and that each step they take in a task degrades their accuracy and the final action. She said if an AI agent could perform each step with 95% accuracy-which currently isn't possible-a 10-step task would yield an action with a ~59.9% success rate. And if you had a 30-step task, the success rate would be ~21.4%. Furthermore, if we used a more realistic accuracy rate of 90%, then a 30-step task would drop down to a success rate of 4.2%. She added that the best agent models failed 70% of the time. How to make AI agents private and secure Whittaker said there currently isn't a solution for making AI agents preserve privacy, security, and control; there's only triage, but companies can take steps now to mitigate it. 1. Stop the reckless deployment of AI agents to avoid plain-text database access to malware. 2. Make opting out the default, with mandatory developer opt-ins. 3. AI companies must provide radical (or any) transparency about how everything works and make it auditable at the granular level. If the industry doesn't heed Whittaker's and Tiwari's warnings, the age of agentic AI could be in jeopardy, primarily because consumers could quickly lose their trust in a technology that is already overhyped and over-invested in. Comments Members can view and leave comments on all articles. Find out more about how to become a member. If you're already a member, sign in to view and leave comments. Add as preferred source on Google If you enjoyed reading this ad-free article, you can help support our independent journalism by adding Coywolf as a preferred source. Headshot for Jon Henshaw Jon Henshaw Jon Henshaw is the founder of Coywolf and an industry veteran with almost three decades of SEO, digital marketing, and web technologies experience. Follow @jon@henshaw.social --------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact Coywolf Coywolf LLC 2020 Fieldstone Pkwy STE 900-122 Franklin, TN 37069-4337 +1 615-461-0902 / Fediverse: @coywolf@coywolf.social Membership Learn more about the features and benefits of being a Coywolf member. Existing members can sign in to access all premium content and services. Site navigation * Coywolf News * Guides and insights * Product and service reviews * PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) * Coywolf newsletter * Digital marketing podcast * Coywolf videos * Coywolf blog * Merch store Search Coywolf News Policies & Standards - No AI - Submit news tip - Privacy Policy - Terms of Service Coywolf uses Rocket.net for blazingly-fast WordPress hosting and Fathom for privacy-first web analytics. (c) 2017-2026 Coywolf LLC All Rights Reserved Coywolf and the Coywolf logo are registered trademarks of Coywolf LLC