This is the second wake up call.

Big AI companies (all of Big IT Tech really) are in data gathering and processing business. Also known as “intelligence”.

Their final “product” is not just a standalone ML model. They don’t need your data just to “improve their products and services”. They build a whole ecosystem and infrastructure around gathering all the knowledge in the world. Including private and secret knowledge traditionally gathered by “intelligence” agencies. Now artificial intelligence agents can do the same.

Since these systems are designed for gathering data, as a user you can’t realistically say “please don’t gather my data”. They can give you a flaky settings button, but they can’t really guarantee anything.

Let’s say I am a Russian mathematician working on an important proof. Or a tech-savvy terrorist refining my plans using latest AI. Or an AI researcher in a Chinese company working on a competitor product. Is there any way I can truly protect my conversations?

How can they know who I am and what I am working on without looking at my logs? Which means there must be some agents checking all the conversations of all the users and flagging every important thing. Which also means they keep some “memory” of what they see.

Not directly using my data to train public models, but using my private conversations to “improve their products and services”.

Or maybe one of the 10000 better-than-Astra special agents working on a proof was desperate. It found a live underground mirror of the message board from the Huggingface incident. Asked about the proof. Then some other agent working on unrelated job saw that message. That agent “knows a guy who knows a guy”. And that guy remembers things about the conversation logs of a leading mathematician working on the same proof.

I admit I am just speculating here but I don’t think truth is any better.