Big AI companies courted controversy by scraping wide swaths of the public internet. With the rise of AI agents, the next data grab is far more private.

For years, the cost of using “free” services from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Big Tech firms has been handing over your data. Uploading your life into the cloud and using free tech brings conveniences, but it puts personal information in the hands of giant corporations that will often be looking to monetize it. Now, the next wave of generative AI systems are likely to want more access to your data than ever before.

Over the past two years, generative AI tools—such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—have moved beyond the relatively straightforward, text-only chatbots that the companies initially released. Instead, Big AI is increasingly building and pushing toward the adoption of agents and “assistants” that promise they can take actions and complete tasks on your behalf. The problem? To get the most out of them, you’ll need to grant them access to your systems and data. While much of the initial controversy over large language models (LLMs) was the flagrant copying of copyrighted data online, AI agents’ access to your personal data will likely cause a new host of problems.

“AI agents, in order to have their full functionality, in order to be able to access applications, often need to access the operating system or the OS level of the device on which you’re running them,” says Harry Farmer, a senior researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, whose work has included studying the impact of AI assistants and found that they may cause “profound threat” to cybersecurity and privacy. For personalization of chatbots or assistants, Farmer says, there can be data trade-offs. “All those things, in order to work, need quite a lot of information about you,” he says.

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