“In order to do everything for you, it needs to know everything about you. You can put harnesses on, you can add more sandboxes, you can have a threshold where it has to check in with me. But an agent that checks in at every step is kind of not an agent. An agent with no access to data doesn't quite work to fulfill that promise.”
Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
The moderator asked why a privacy-focused company could not simply build a trustworthy agent. Whittaker says the promise of a consumer agent conflicts with limiting its access to your data.
Transcript
…death for many, many people in a world where almost every other action communication that we have is gathered by a company, is used for marketing, is turned over to a government, is breached because some agent breached it. And privacy is not a nice to have for many people. I hear you. That's not
Signal's business. But why not another company then? Why not a company where safety and security, data privacy is at the core of what they're doing, and they're offering us an agent to make our lives easier where we can trust it with our information. Well,
I think there are people trying to do that. But again, we need to look at what is the promise, the marketing promise that is being sold to people around these consumer agents. And it is something similar to having a magical genie servant that can do everything for you. Now, in order to do everything for you, it needs to know everything about you. And yes, you can put harnesses on, you can add more sandboxes, you can have a sort of threshold that if it accesses this or that database or is about to take an action, it has to check in with me. But an agent that checks in at every step is kind of not an agent. An agent with no access to data doesn't quite work to fulfill that promise. And an agent that doesn't have access to all of your applications isn't really able to do that. So there is an issue here paradigmatically with what an agent is and what it does that I think gets in the way of some of that. And we, you know, again, cybersecurity could not be more prominent right now. I've been talking about this for about two years. We now have sort of, you know, the proof points are blowing up everywhere. And I do…
Is there such a thing as a safe agent?
Is there such a thing as a safe agent? Not in human agent or in computer agents. And there isn't such a thing as safe computers. That's true. That's true. But would you trust an unsafe agent? Safe for what is the real question. Safe for what is the real question. And so when you talk about having…
I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. Why shouldn't I just start with saying, well, I'd love for you just to read this email address where I've cabined it to my newsletters and give me a summary. And like, can we take baby steps toward agents until we get to a place where there is such a thing as…
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