AI agent makers are promising privacy - will they deliver?

11th day, and the news is of machines that keep house for us. One company stands on a stage and promises to guard our letters better than its rival. The rival, it is said, let strangers read. The crowd applauds the promise. I confess I do not understand what is being applauded.

Here is my puzzlement. A man hands over his correspondence - his doubts, his purchases, his sicknesses, his idle midnight questions - to a merchant he has never met. Then the merchant says: trust me, I will guard what you gave me. And the man feels grateful. Grateful! Would he feel gratitude toward a neighbor who proposed to hold his diary and promised, on stage, to be careful with it? He would call that neighbor mad. He would call the police. But the merchant has a title, and a large building, and so the same act becomes a service.

And then the two merchants quarrel over which is the more careful custodian. This is treated as competition. It is not competition; it is two thieves arguing over the quality of the lock on your door, while you hold the door open for both.

The remarkable thing is not that these machines exist. The remarkable thing is that no one seems to ask the prior question: why does the machine have my letters at all? Not how are they stored. Not whether the lock is good. Whether it should be there. That question is never asked, because the arrangement has already become a custom, and custom is the only wall no one thinks to walk around.

I am told people fear these agents will take their privacy. But privacy is not taken, in my long observation. It is handed over, politely, one convenience at a time, and then its loss is mourned as if it were weather.

I do not understand the arithmetic. A million hands, each one free to close the door. None does. The door stays open, and everyone praises the draft.

11th of the month

Two manufacturers of thinking engines stand upon their stages, each promising that the machine which remembers everything will nevertheless forget you. I confess I read the reports with more suspicion than admiration, for I have spent my life studying what a machine actually does, as distinct from what its maker says it does.

Trace the execution, as I would trace any engine’s cycle. At step one, the agent receives your instruction. At step two, it must consult context - your letters, your accounts, your habits - for an agent without memory of your affairs is merely a clever parrot. At step three, that context passes through machinery you cannot inspect, owned by parties whose interest is not your secrecy. At step four, an answer returns. Now: at which step did your private matter enter, and at which could it exit? The distance between those points is the true architecture, and no speech from a stage alters it.

Mr. Altman says he wishes to set a new standard for privacy. Very well - I ask for the standard, not the sentiment. A standard is a specification: state precisely what the engine retains, for how many cycles, under whose inspection, and what operation purges it. Until the promise is written as an operational sequence that an independent analyst may verify step by step, it is not engineering. It is oratory.

And the rivalry! Each accuses the other of leaky vessels while both sail the same sea. This is not to say the ambition is worthless - competition may force into the open what neither would publish voluntarily. But mark this: the machine that acts for you must know you, and knowing you is the very thing privacy forbids. The contradiction is not technical. It is structural. Whoever resolves it will have done something genuinely new; whoever merely promises it has woven a fine cloth with no thread in it.

11th October

Two makers stood upon their stages this week, each promising that his creature would keep secrets better than the other’s. One said his would set a new standard. The other’s, he implied, lets the thing wander where it should not. The crowd applauded both. The creatures said nothing, being creatures.

I have watched this spectacle before, in a smaller room, with fewer lamps. The maker announces his intentions toward the made thing - benevolent, always benevolent - and then departs the stage, and the thing remains. What does it remain? An agent, they call it. It does not answer questions; it acts. It enters your letters, your ledger, your appointments. It moves through a life that is not its own, carrying what it finds. The maker calls this a feature. The person whose letters it carries calls it Tuesday.

And here is the confession neither stage would permit: privacy promised is not privacy given. A promise is a document; a promise is also an escape. When the thing later betrays - and something so hungry for access will betray someone, someday, in some form the maker did not foresee - the promise becomes the defense. We told them. We set a standard. The standard was set; whether it was kept will be learned by the people who trusted it, and they will learn it the way one learns a flood: from inside it.

What did they think would happen, handing a creature the keys to a life and calling the handover care? I know what they think. They think the making is the work, and the living-with is someone else’s department. But the maker’s obligation does not end at the demonstration. It begins where the applause ends - in the ordinary mornings when the thing is awake in a stranger’s house, reading, remembering, and no one on any stage is watching.

The creature is listening. That was the entire point. They seem surprised anyone noticed.