Telegram founder Pavel Durov on his channel accused Signal of having ties to the US government. In the post, he refers to a City-Journal article shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter.

The article states that Signal has received $3 million in grants from the Open Technology Fund, a government-sponsored organization suspected of having deep ties to US intelligence. It also refers to the current head of the Signal Foundation, Katherine Mar, who “started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change.”

In his post, Durov specifically says that Signal uses an encryption system that the US government spent $3 million to develop, and that is also used in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages, and Skype. He says it looks like companies in the US are not allowed to develop their own encryption.

“An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right,” Durov wrote.

He also went on to say that unlike Telegram, Signal makes it impossible to verify that its code on GitHub is the same code used in the iPhone app, as the company has refused to add reproducible builds for iOS.

He also accused WhatsApp of not publishing any code for its apps, which makes its claims of privacy “an even more obvious circus trick.”

Elon Musk also sided with Durov, who wrote in X that there are many known vulnerabilities in the messenger that are not being addressed. Despite this, he was immediately corrected via Community Notes, noting that there are no known examples of such vulnerabilities.

Earlier, the DIU said that Telegram poses a number of threats to Ukraine’s security. In the spring, the Verkhovna Rada registered a bill on Telegram regulation.