OpenAI and Meta are now racing each other on privacy, not just features.
At OpenAI's DevDay, CEO Sam Altman introduced the company's new AI agent, Dots, and said OpenAI wants to "set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI." Through the rest of the event, OpenAI took veiled shots at Meta's Muse, its closest rival in the agent race. The jab had a familiar ring: a couple of months earlier, Mark Zuckerberg had launched Muse as a supposedly safer replacement for its predecessor, OpenClaw, promising it was "built from the ground up for privacy and security."
The pivot makes sense. Agents need more access than any chatbot - your calendar, your inbox, your files - to actually do anything useful, which turns the privacy pitch into a competitive necessity rather than a nice-to-have. Both companies are betting that whoever convinces users they are the safer choice wins the agent race, even though neither has a long track record of handling personal data well.
That is the catch. In an industry already defined by data hoarding and routine breaches, two competitors calling each other unsafe is not the same as either one being safe.