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OpenAI Says Dots Is the Private AI Agent. Meta Said the Same About Muse.
Based on reporting from The Verge
My verdict: I do not believe any of them, and I will not use one until time shows the holes are closed.
At its DevDay event, OpenAI unveiled Dots, its AI agent, and Sam Altman said the company wants to “set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI.” The target was obvious: Meta’s Muse. The problem is that Muse launched not long before with the same pitch, as the safer alternative to OpenClaw, and the record since then is not encouraging.
According to The Verge, Muse keeps each user’s data in an isolated virtual machine, but Meta itself can still access it. Meta says a way to cryptographically block its own access is coming later this year. A security researcher, Patrick Wardle, disclosed a zero-day flaw that could let someone take control of the agent, which Meta has since patched. Muse also lets Meta train its models on what users put into it by default, unless they opt out, and an Inc. reporter said it read his private messages without being asked. Dots, for its part, has had few privacy scandals so far, but it is only available on ChatGPT plans that start at $100 a month, so far fewer people are using it.
I will be honest about the appeal. I do not really like these agents, but they can speed up work a great deal, and a well-managed agent can make a job genuinely efficient. That is the whole pitch, and it is not a fake one. The price is access to your files, your messages and your apps.
That is where I stop. Until these companies prove there are no more vulnerabilities, and only time will show that, I am not handing an agent the keys. And no, I do not believe the privacy promises. In my view, most companies do not care about our privacy, and my assumption is that our data ends up sold without leaving a trace. I cannot prove that for Dots or for Muse. I can only point out that every new agent arrives promising to be the private one, and the previous one made the same promise.
Read The Verge’s piece and decide for yourselves what that promise is worth.
