AI agent makers are promising privacy — will they deliver?

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AI agent makers are promising privacy — will they deliver?

AI 代理开发商承诺提供隐私保护——他们能兑现吗？

Meta positioned its Muse agent as a safer alternative to OpenClaw. OpenAI promises Dots is a safer alternative to Muse.

Meta 将其 Muse 代理定位为 OpenClaw 的更安全替代品。OpenAI 则承诺 Dots 是比 Muse 更安全的替代品。

At this year’s OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company’s new AI agent Dots — and told the crowd that the company wants to “set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI.” OpenAI would spend the day taking veiled shots at Meta’s Muse, its primary competitor, for failing to keep users’ data safe.

在今年的 OpenAI 开发者大会上，首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）发布了该公司的新型 AI 代理 Dots，并向现场观众表示，公司希望“为前沿 AI 的隐私保护树立新标准”。OpenAI 在当天多次含蓄地抨击其主要竞争对手 Meta 的 Muse，指责其未能保障用户数据安全。

Yet Muse itself, a couple of months earlier, had launched as a supposedly safer alternative to predecessor OpenClaw — with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising it was “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”

然而，Muse 本身在几个月前发布时，也被宣称为其前身 OpenClaw 的更安全替代品，首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）当时承诺它是“从底层开始就为隐私和安全而构建的”。

In an age when companies hoard customers’ personal data and cyberattacks are a dime a dozen, AI labs are trying to convince users to share even more information with their agents. Their latest strategy for success is one-upping the competition by promising that unlike their rivals, they’ll keep user data away from prying eyes. The question is whether companies can keep these promises.

在这个公司囤积客户个人数据且网络攻击司空见惯的时代，AI 实验室正试图说服用户与他们的代理分享更多信息。他们最新的成功策略是通过承诺“与竞争对手不同，他们能保护用户数据免受窥探”来胜过对手。问题在于，这些公司能否信守承诺。

Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, wrote on X that the company’s “goal with muse was to build something like openclaw that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people.” User data is stored on a secure VM, what Zuckerberg described as an “isolated linux computer with a browser, CPU, memory, and storage.”

Meta 超级智能实验室产品负责人纳特·弗里德曼（Nat Friedman）在 X 上写道，公司“开发 Muse 的目标是构建一个类似 OpenClaw 的产品，使其既安全可靠、易于使用，又能扩展到数十亿用户”。用户数据存储在一个安全的虚拟机（VM）中，扎克伯格将其描述为“一台带有浏览器、CPU、内存和存储的隔离 Linux 计算机”。

The company said that most of the effort in building Muse was related to “careful design and engineering to operate [it] more safely.” Meta’s blog post continued, “Muse can and will still make mistakes, but we expect they’ll be much less frequent and cause much less damage due to the safety systems we’ve built in.”

该公司表示，构建 Muse 的大部分工作都与“为了更安全地运行而进行的精心设计和工程”有关。Meta 的博客文章继续写道：“Muse 仍然会犯错，但我们预计，由于我们内置的安全系统，这些错误发生的频率会低得多，造成的损害也会小得多。”

But though Muse topped the App Store charts and, per Apptopia, gained 600,000 daily active users in the US within weeks, Meta’s promises seem to have fallen short. Although data is isolated from other users, and the company plans to introduce a way “to cryptographically and verifiably prevent Meta from accessing data in your VM” later this year, Meta itself can still access the data.

尽管 Muse 登上了应用商店排行榜，并且据 Apptopia 数据显示，其在美国几周内就获得了 60 万日活跃用户，但 Meta 的承诺似乎并未完全兑现。虽然数据与其他用户是隔离的，且该公司计划在今年晚些时候引入一种“以加密且可验证的方式阻止 Meta 访问虚拟机内数据”的方法，但目前 Meta 本身仍然可以访问这些数据。

A security researcher quickly exposed a zero-day vulnerability that could allow someone to take control of Muse (which has since been patched), raising fears of outside attacks. Multiple serious security issues reportedly cropped up at the last minute before launch, one of which could have allowed users to access Meta’s own internal databases, per 404 Media.

一位安全研究人员迅速曝光了一个零日漏洞，该漏洞可能允许他人控制 Muse（此漏洞现已修复），引发了人们对外部攻击的担忧。据 404 Media 报道，在发布前的最后一刻，据称出现了多个严重的安全问题，其中一个问题甚至可能允许用户访问 Meta 自己的内部数据库。

Muse also appears to liberally collect (and in some cases, hand out) data. It defaults to allowing Meta to train models on what users put into it, though it’s possible to opt out. An Inc. reporter complained that Muse uploaded and read his private messages without him asking it to, and a YouTuber said it had offered his address to a stranger via Marketplace — in both cases, Muse was functioning apparently as intended, but the user didn’t realize how far it would go.

Muse 似乎还在随意收集（在某些情况下甚至分发）数据。它默认允许 Meta 使用用户输入的内容来训练模型，尽管用户可以选择退出。一位《Inc.》杂志的记者抱怨称，Muse 在未经他要求的情况下上传并读取了他的私人信息；一位 YouTuber 则表示，Muse 通过 Marketplace 将他的地址提供给了陌生人——在这两种情况下，Muse 的运行似乎都符合其设计初衷，但用户并未意识到它会走得这么远。

The platform creates “detailed profiles of all your friends and family,” as Wired reported. None of this is necessarily unexpected from Meta, but it certainly doesn’t back up the idea that Muse is uniquely privacy- or security-conscious.

正如《连线》（Wired）所报道的那样，该平台会创建“你所有朋友和家人的详细档案”。对于 Meta 来说，这些情况并不令人意外，但这显然无法证明 Muse 在隐私或安全意识方面具有独特性。

OpenAI seized on this fact when announcing Dots in late September. Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI’s Codex product lead, said onstage at DevDay that OpenAI is focused on having the “most trustworthy, safe, and secure assistant,” and CEO Sam Altman demonstrated ways that people could exert control over their individual Dots, such as setting a rule that it should never make a purchase over a certain dollar amount.

OpenAI 在 9 月下旬宣布 Dots 时抓住了这一点。OpenAI 的 Codex 产品负责人亚历山大·恩比里科斯（Alexander Embiricos）在开发者大会舞台上表示，OpenAI 专注于打造“最值得信赖、最安全可靠的助手”，首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼则演示了人们如何控制各自的 Dots，例如设置规则，禁止其进行超过特定金额的购买。

“I think we’re in a different position to Meta in that they don’t have an AI product that has 1.2 billion users,” said Glen Coates, OpenAI’s head of app platform, adding that “launching something that makes those kinds of mistakes is something that we would try to take the care to avoid.”

“我认为我们与 Meta 的处境不同，因为他们没有拥有 12 亿用户的 AI 产品，”OpenAI 应用平台负责人格伦·科茨（Glen Coates）说道，并补充说，“发布那种会犯此类错误的产品，是我们会极力避免的。”

Altman himself also pushed the privacy angle at DevDay. To court business customers, executives presented a framework allowing enterprises to have “stronger controls” over their data and zero data retention policy options (meaning no data is stored on OpenAI servers). Indeed, so far, there haven’t been many privacy scandals with Dots — although since it’s only available on the $100-and-up ChatGPT subscription tiers, there are also likely fewer people using it.

奥特曼本人也在开发者大会上强调了隐私角度。为了争取企业客户，高管们展示了一个框架，允许企业对其数据拥有“更强的控制权”，并提供零数据保留策略选项（意味着数据不会存储在 OpenAI 服务器上）。事实上，到目前为止，Dots 还没有出现太多隐私丑闻——尽管由于它仅适用于 100 美元及以上的 ChatGPT 订阅层级，使用它的人数可能也较少。

People may still not feel comfortable giving OpenAI their personal data, in part simply because AI agents require so much of it. For instance, The Verge’s Allison Johnson felt uncomfortable typing in her bank information when the bot asked as part of a relevant task (Muse has a Stripe integration to take care of that).

人们可能仍然不放心将个人数据交给 OpenAI，部分原因仅仅是因为 AI 代理需要的数据量太大了。例如，《The Verge》的艾莉森·约翰逊（Allison Johnson）在机器人作为相关任务的一部分要求她输入银行信息时，感到很不舒服（Muse 有 Stripe 集成来处理此类事务）。

Not all companies are making privacy promises, of course. Instinct was publicly criticized for reportedly overly-broad terms of service that gave it unfettered access to data; since then, the company seems to have made adjustments. For now, AI labs seem to be counting on a three-part approach to popularizing AI agent use with the general public: Make them useful, make them cute and disarming to help offset the creepiness, and make promises about privacy — and hope they hold up.

当然，并非所有公司都在做出隐私承诺。Instinct 因据称过于宽泛的服务条款而受到公开批评，这些条款使其能够不受限制地访问数据；此后，该公司似乎已做出调整。目前，AI 实验室似乎寄希望于通过三管齐下的方法来普及 AI 代理在大众中的使用：让它们变得有用，让它们变得可爱且具有亲和力以抵消怪异感，并做出隐私承诺——然后祈祷这些承诺能够经得起考验。