Mac users can now give ChatGPT their entire Messages history and have it write texts. Hand OpenAI your house keys while you're at it.
Since January 2026, users have been able to hand over all of their Apple Health data to OpenAI, in return for medical advice that can be dangerously wrong. Despite earning at least one more lawsuit because of that, OpenAI is pressing ahead, and has now chosen to take on Messages on the Mac.
A new Messages plugin for ChatGPT is intended to search your messages, which could be handy. It's meant to summarize message threads, which could be a blessing.
But it's also meant to write messages for you, because it's arduous to type out six words and an emoji. OpenAI insists that it's fine letting ChatGPT write your messages, ignoring the whole soulless aspect of that, because you have to approve a message before it's sent.
Yet ChatGPT's own video shows that there is an option to "Always allow sending to this chat." So it appears that, no, you don't have to approve each message.
Then according to Bloomberg, OpenAI noted that the plugin can only work if the user chooses to use it. The company further emphasized that this is all done on device, plus it does not create an index of users' messages.
Yet reportedly during sign up to the plugin, ChatGPT notifies the user that it will access their on-device Messages history. So whether it builds an index or not, if you use the plugin, it has full access to everything you've sent on Messages.
And then under the right conditions, it can send Messages for you. So now you're trusting all of that potentially private information to OpenAI and assuming it won't do anything with it.
OpenAI would be one of the firms that ripped off all authors of all books in the world in order to train its AI, and then sell your information back to you.
Apple has not commented on OpenAI's launch, but it may be significant that the plugin is for the Mac and not, as yet, the iPhone. OpenAI says that it uses AppleScript the Mac's Accessibility features to perform these tasks, and there is no AppleScript for iPhone.
Whether or not Apple's iOS privacy features would mean ChatGPT couldn't take over Messages as it now can on the Mac, don't use it. It is taking the privacy and security of Apple's Messages, and potentially undoing all of that just to have the ability to quick search through messages.
That is genuinely a benefit, if you have enough Messages threads to make searching manually a chore. But if you do need this feature, you're getting it anyway with the forthcoming Siri AI.
