Signal's Founder Built a Chatbot That Can't Spy on You Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? What to Know: Signal's founder is working on encrypted chatbots Moxie Marlinspike, the cryptographic prodigy who wrote the code that underpins Signal and WhatsApp, has a new project--and it could be one of the most important things happening in AI right now. The tool, named Confer, is an end-to-end encrypted AI assistant. It uses smart math to ensure that even though the compute-intensive process of running the AI still happens on a server in the cloud, the only person who can access the unscrambled details of that computation is you, the user.

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A smartphone shows the official website of ChatGPT Atlas. A smartphone shows the official website of ChatGPT Atlas. "It'd be really nice to have a service that was sort of just observing your life and proactively helping you when you needed it," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a recent Q&A about OpenAI's plans. This vision is at the heart of a new crop of AI browsers, notably OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity's Comet. AI browsers differ from traditional browsers in at least two important ways.

'Every user has to make a choice of actually wanting to download Firefox and use it.' 'Every user has to make a choice of actually wanting to download Firefox and use it.' Do you need an assistant for your online activities? Multiple major players in artificial intelligence are moving on from chatbots like ChatGPT and are now focusing their efforts on new browsers with deep AI integrations. Those could take the form of an agent that shops for you or an omnipresent chatbot that follows you around and summarizes what you're seeing, looks up related stuff, or answers related questions.

AI-powered browser assistants (also known as autonomous browsing agents or agentic AI browsers) are emerging tools that use LLMs to help users navigate and interact with web content. For example, an AI agent can be instructed to summarize a webpage or perform actions like clicking links and filling forms on behalf of the user. While these agents promise enhanced productivity, they also introduce new security risks. One major risk is prompt injection, where an attacker embeds malicious instructions into web content that the agent will process [5]. Crucially, such instructions can be hidden from the human user (e.g., invisible text, HTML comments) yet still parsed by the LLM, causing it to alter its behavior in unintended ways [10]. In effect, the agent can be tricked into executing the attacker's commands rather than the user's, leading to potentially severe consequences [2]. Indirect prompt injections have been demonstrated in real-world scenarios.

Perplexity's AI-powered browser, Comet, contained a dangerous vulnerability, according to an Israeli cybersecurity firm. Perplexity's AI-powered browser, Comet, contained a dangerous vulnerability, according to an Israeli cybersecurity firm. Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? Last week, Perplexity announced that its AI-powered browser, called Comet, would be made free for all users after previously requiring a paid subscription.

There's a new generation of browsers coming to shake up the market and revolutionize the way we use the web--at least, that's how new "AI" browsers like Perplexity's Comet are being pitched to users. But it looks like giving control of your web browsing over to an AI system may be a bit of a gamble, as new research shows that they're at least as susceptible to scams as fleshy humans… possibly more so. Security researchers at Guardio put the AI-powered Comet browser through a series of tests that replicated existing scams and targeted new ones to its "agentic AI" approach. Agentic AI allows you to tell the browser what you want done in plain words, and then the browser acts as an agent on your behalf and performs the actions for you. But Perplexity's AI system seems a bit more trusting than most experienced web users.

Perplexity AI said it has made a 34.5bn unsolicited all-cash offer for Alphabet's Google Chrome browser. The deal, if Alphabet agreed to it, would also require financing above the startup's most recently reported valuation of 18bn. The nearly three-year-old startup's purchase of Chrome, if approved, would give the company access to its more than three billion users as regulatory pressure weighs on Google's control over the tech industry. Perplexity did not disclose on Tuesday how it plans to fund the offer, but has raised 1bn in funding from investors including SoftBank and the semiconductor chip giant Nvidia. Several funds have said they would finance the deal in full if Alphabet accepts, the Reuters news agency reported citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.