Snapchat sold America a promise from day one: send it, see it, gone. Messages disappear, photos vanish, and your digital life stays a little more private than everywhere else.
That promise is why hundreds of millions of people, most of them young, made it their default way to talk to friends.
But something new has been sitting at the very top of every Snapchat inbox for the past two years, and it works nothing like the app around it.
The AI friend that nobody asked to move in
In 2023, Snap placed a chatbot called My AI permanently at the top of every user’s chat feed.
It could not be removed at first. Not pinned, not hidden. Just there, waiting, above every real conversation you had with real people.
The pitch was friendly: a built-in assistant that could answer questions, recommend restaurants, help plan trips, or just chat when you were bored.
For a generation that grew up treating the app as a private messaging tool, it felt like a natural next step.
Many users, especially teens, started treating it exactly like a confidant, sharing personal details the same way they would with a friend.
What the chatbot does with everything you type
Most users assumed that because Snapchat messages disappear, their conversations with My AI worked the same way.
They do not.
When you interact with My AI, Snap uses the content you share and your location (if you have enabled location sharing with Snapchat) to improve Snap’s products, including enhancing My AI’s safety and security, and to personalize your experience, including ads.
That is Snap’s own language, from its official privacy and safety hub.
Snap’s privacy policy explicitly includes data from AI features like My AI, which Snap says is used to improve its products and personalize advertising, meaning conversations that feel like they vanish are, in fact, being used to improve the company’s AI systems and to target advertising.
A regulator called it a worrying failure
The UK’s data protection authority issued a formal preliminary enforcement notice against Snap on 6 October 2023 over My AI’s potential risks to children’s privacy.
Information Commissioner John Edwards stated: “The provisional findings of our investigation suggest a worrying failure by Snap to adequately identify and assess the privacy risks to children and other users before launching ‘My AI.'”
The ICO subsequently concluded its investigation in May 2024, saying it was satisfied that Snap had addressed concerns about risks to children’s privacy by implementing appropriate mitigations. At the same time, the ICO issued a broader warning to industry to assess privacy risks before bringing generative AI tools to market.
Meanwhile, Snapchat reached 932 million monthly active users in Q2 2025, with daily active users hitting 469 million, up 9% year-over-year. The growth is happening largely outside North America, and the U.S. market, where Snapchat earns its highest revenue per user, remains its most competitive battleground.
The federal government stepped in, and here is the real catch
The Federal Trade Commission referred a complaint against Snap to the Department of Justice. “The complaint pertains to the company’s deployment of an artificial intelligence powered chatbot, My AI, in its Snapchat application and the allegedly resulting risks and harms to young users of the application,” the FTC said.
The FTC said in a press release that it voted during a closed meeting to authorize issuance of a public statement about its referral to the DOJ. The commission voted 3-0-2, with FTC commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson recorded as absent. The referral was made on January 16, 2025.
The real catch is not just data collection. It is the gap between the brand and the product.
Snapchat’s entire identity was built on the idea that what you share disappears. My AI is structurally the opposite: a persistent, always-on listener that connects your words, your location, and your behavior directly to advertising and product improvement.
For anyone curious about where the broader AI assistant market is heading, one app dominated more than half the AI assistant market for over three years, and the shift that arrived in early 2026 changes who is really winning that race.
And it is worth noting that the Threads platform, which reached 500 million users, only just launched parental tools for U.S. teens, signaling that the whole social industry is playing catch-up on young-user protections.
What users can actually do about it right now
Snap does give users some controls. You can clear your My AI conversation history in settings, and you can limit location sharing so the chatbot cannot read your precise whereabouts.
Paid Snapchat+ subscribers also gained the ability to remove My AI from the top of the chat feed entirely, something free users still cannot do by default.
Snapchat built its brand on a specific promise of privacy, ephemerality, and freedom from digital surveillance, and every AI feature it has deployed is in direct tension with that original identity.
The platform is not unique in this tension. Nearly every major social app has layered AI tools onto products users trusted for different reasons entirely.
The honest takeaway: any time a free social platform adds a chatbot that lives in your inbox, the conversation is the product, and the app’s original privacy promise almost certainly did not cover it.
