The Most Interesting Thing in AI

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AI’s Threat to Privacy — Signal’s Meredith Whittaker with Nicholas Thompson

July 01, 2026

AI agents can scour the internet for us, reply to our messages, and add events to our calendars. But in order to do so, they need sweeping access to our data. Handing that over presents an unprecedented threat to privacy, says Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker, who directs the Signal messaging app. In conversation with The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, Whittaker discusses the risks of agentic AI, Signal’s approach to AI coding, and why it’s uncompromising in its commitment to p...

Will AI Agents Kill Social Media–Or Save It? Eli Pariser with Nicholas Thompson

June 24, 2026

Take a scroll through Facebook or TikTok today, and you’ll likely find some AI-generated content: an influencer with impossibly-radiant skin, a stunt that bends the laws of physics, Shrimp Jesus. And while there might not be much social benefit to AI slop, that doesn’t mean that we should shun AI from our feeds entirely, says Eli Pariser. As the author of “The Filter Bubble,” Pariser has been a longtime critic of social media. But he’s also the cofounder of Upworthy, the bubbly bright news si...

How AI Agents Are Changing Business - PwC’s Dan Priest with Nicholas Thompson

June 17, 2026

You've probably heard it already: AI is going to radically change the way we work. But the details change depending on who's making the prediction: AI will wipe out the C-suite, or entry-level jobs, or make us all into prompt engineers. Those scenarios are far-fetched, says Dan Priest. In his role as the Chief AI Officer at PwC, Priest sees firsthand how companies across the industrial landscape are utilizing AI– often in ways that clash with those  fatalistic prognostications. In a vital con...