Social media posts and warning messages have been claiming that OpenAI has entered a partnership with Apple, through which ChatGPT can now access a user’s entire message history and send texts on their behalf. Anyone wanting to protect their privacy should reportedly avoid the plugin — and since one’s own contacts might have enabled it too, some suggest avoiding iMessage altogether. As circulated, this claim is inaccurate.
Factual correction
- No partnership — the two companies are actually in a legal dispute: Apple was not part of the announcement. Apple sued OpenAI in July 2026, accusing it of trade secret infringement. The two companies are opposing parties in litigation, not partners.
- Not system-wide iMessage access, but an optional Mac plugin: This is a plugin for the ChatGPT desktop app, installed via the Plugins interface, that can search, draft, analyze, and — after approval — send messages. It works exclusively on Apple-silicon Macs, not Intel machines, iPhones, or other platforms.
- Sending is not automatic: Sending a message requires user approval by default, and OpenAI explicitly warns against granting persistent approval.
- The access is genuinely concerning — but technically different from “Apple opened up access”: The feature requires the user to grant Full Disk Access, and this permission reads the locally decrypted message database directly — iMessage’s end-to-end encryption offers no protection here, since it only covers transit, not local storage.
- The real risk to third parties is genuine, but framed backwards: it’s not that “your contacts enabled the plugin” — rather, if you enable it, the messages of everyone you’ve corresponded with potentially become accessible to the AI, without their knowledge or consent. That is where the data privacy issue lies.