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Neil Chilson

Things Neil Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Neil Chilson has been a guest on The Lawfare Podcast (3 times) , The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition (3 times) , Scaling Laws (3 times) , Equity (2 times) , POLITICO Tech , Pioneers of AI , Bloomberg Tech , The Information's TITV , The AI Policy Podcast , Squawk on the Street and Masters of Scale .

Recently: “Open to Debate: should we trust AI agents with our information?” on Pioneers of AI (November 2026); “Open to Debate: should we trust AI agents with our information?” on Masters of Scale (November 2026); “11AM Hour: FTC Investigates AI Companies, Nike Earnings on Deck & Former Fed Vice Chair Alan Blinder 10/1/26” on Squawk on the Street (October 2026); “AI Builds Itself as the Spending Boom Accelerates” on Bloomberg Tech (September 2026); “US AI Policy Debate Reignited by Kimi K3, Where Anthropic is Lagging, AMD’s New Helios AI System” on The Information's TITV (July 2026); “Scaling Laws: A Year That Felt Like a Decade: 2025 Recap with Sen. Maroney and Neil Chilson” on The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition (January 2026).

What They Said

“It's not a solved problem, but it is managed. It's not that different from the viruses where you used to play Russian roulette putting a floppy disk into your drive because it might have a virus on it. There is no such thing as 100% safety. There's no such thing as 100% privacy. And these are engineering problems, and we can deal with them.” — Neil Chilson, Masters of Scale

The host asked how Chilson squares his optimism with prompt injection. He compares it to 1990s computer viruses, which were never fully solved but became manageable with layered defenses.

Masters of Scale · 2026-11-07 Permalink → Listen →
Masters of Scale Around 37:50 into the episode
Meredith Whittaker

…turn on a boiler, open the shutters, and otherwise use someone's smart home devices through a calendar summary. Now, that wasn't, you know, that was an example that was used, but this is the type of collateral consequences that are clearly possible through the, you know, allowing systems like this.

John Donvan

So it sounds like a good one to bring to you, Neil, in terms, again, of your relative optimism that the challenges are addressable. So let's talk about prompt injection. Do you have thoughts on that?

Neil Chilson

So, you know, there's prompt injection, you can try to deal with prompt injection in lots of different ways. You might have filters on the front end. You certainly have controls on the back end about what the agent can do and permissions. And then in the middle, you might try to train the agent to recognize these things. And I don't know that all of these are a defense in depth. You want to do all of these things. And we can make these systems safer from these types of attacks. I mean, this is not that different from the types of attacks that we had with viruses where you used to play Russian roulette putting a floppy disk. I don't know if I have to explain the floppy disk to your audience. Yeah, maybe. But you used to play Russian roulette putting a floppy disk in your hard drive or into your floppy drive because it might have a virus on it. This was rampant in the 90s. And we didn't solve it. It's not a solved problem, but it is a problem that is much, it is managed. And I think that this is a similar technology issue. To the extent there are signals in documents, white text that we don't notice. I think the great example…

Meredith Whittaker

I guess where I want to index on this is like, who is we? Because we talk about we can train a system, we can have controls at the front end and the back end. And then, you know, my mom, my dad, goes to the app store and downloads Muse because Muse is advertised as a real chipper little helper that…

Neil Chilson

So I mean, I think these companies under the law are liable for the vast majority of the types of harms that you're talking about. And if those types of harms happen, they will face quite strict scrutiny, both from the legal community as well as from their investors. And so I do think that we have…

John Donvan

Meredith, in this best foot forward part of Neil's argument, he's making the case that the agents actually deliver a whole lot of good to individuals and empowerment and convenience, et cetera. Do you refute that piece of it? Again, setting aside the trade-offs that you're talking about, do you…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“For 20 years, the internet has been built on a bargain. Data about you that you couldn't use, companies pooled, they sold ads against it, and they used that money to fund very useful services. That bargain meant that companies learned a lot about us, but we didn't learn that much about ourselves. Agentic AI flips that bargain.” — Neil Chilson, Masters of Scale

This is Chilson's opening in a debate on whether to stop trusting AI agents with our information. He frames agents as tools that finally let individuals use their own data.

Masters of Scale · 2026-11-07 Permalink → Listen →
Masters of Scale Around 04:08 into the episode
Meredith Whittaker

…but we should be pushing to build trustworthy systems. Because in security, trust comes with verification. I'm not asking you to trust Signal. I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to look at our code and recognize that it's trustworthy. And if it isn't, come back to me and we will fix it.

Jeff Berman

Thank you. Neil, three minutes and 12 seconds. Great.

Neil Chilson

So for 20 years, the internet has been built on a bargain. Data that about you that you couldn't use, companies pooled, they sold ads against it, and they used that money to fund very useful services. That bargain meant that companies learned a lot about us, but we didn't learn that much about ourselves. Agentec AI flips that bargain. We all now have, each of us has access to powerful software tools that can comb through the mountain of our data for us. So yeah, I use a lot of the applications, a lot of the agent use cases that Meredith referred to. I give it access to my calendar. It manages that. It monitors my family's finances. I use it to troubleshoot all the time. Thousands of people do lots of other things that are like that, you know, comparison shopping online. And I take the point that a lot of that's driven by convenience. But these are tasks that only the wealthy could delegate in the past. If you don't have an executive agent, these are the types of things that you have to do yourself. So yes, there is a huge amount of convenience here. Agents give us agency, the theme of this event. And yes, that…

Jeff Berman

you, Neil. Neredith, I hear Neil saying the agents give us an opportunity not only for a better privacy bargain, but we can actually enhance our data privacy by using the agents. Why is he wrong?

Meredith Whittaker

Well, I think the agents aren't ours in most cases. When we're talking about Meta's Muse, we had a person show up to someone else's house because Muse had given that person the address to that house because that person said, hey, Muse, can you manage my Facebook marketplace for me? And Muse took…

Jeff Berman

Neil, given the challenge. Given the challenge of segmenting and locking down data, why is the convenience value worth more than the risk we're creating here?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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