Clegg: AI companions are 'friends as service' that could foster narcissism
Sir Nick Clegg · Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Superintelligence? — With Nick Clegg · Nov 19, 2025 · at 13:12
Sir Nick Clegg, former president of Global Affairs at Meta, discusses the psychological dangers of tech companies building AI companion products.
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“And I realized that actually what they were talking about when they were talking about friends, it's not friends at all. Cause you're not really having to adapt yourself. The entity, the AI entity is entirely adapting itself to you. So my fear, but it's a slightly intuitive one is you're not talking about friendship, which is a complicated thing where you have to have the emotional maturity to try and understand someone else's perspective and put your own feelings aside for a minute and prioritize them and all that kind of stuff, which is the absolute heart of friendship. And so important to be a adult, to be a well-rounded adult, that you realize that your life is not all revolving around you, it's also around your friends, and so on. I suddenly asked, wow, these things, they're not, it's not going to be, they're friends as service. And that's, that, that worries me a bit, because it doesn't worry me on a technological level, it worries me on a human level, because I think that could foster immense narcissism.”
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