ChatGPT can now read and send your iMessages — but it needs a lot of trust first
OpenAI has given ChatGPT the ability to read and send Apple Messages on Mac, putting the AI directly inside one of the most personal corners of your digital life. The plugin, launched on August 20, is available to ChatGPT Work and Codex subscribers. It lands at an awkward moment: Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in July 2026 over alleged trade secret theft, and the two companies are, by most accounts, not on great terms.
What the plugin does
The feature lets ChatGPT search your message history, draft replies, and send iMessages, SMS, and RCS threads — all from within the ChatGPT interface. OpenAI's own demo shows a user asking the chatbot to surface messages they missed the night before, with ChatGPT then composing a reply ready to send.
Getting it running isn't frictionless. Setup requires granting ChatGPT Full Disk Access in macOS System Settings, plus separate permissions for contacts and automation tools. Every message sent also needs explicit per-message approval by default. OpenAI says processing runs locally without indexing your entire inbox — though, as Engadget notes, that claim hasn't been independently verified.
The catch: Apple Silicon only
The plugin works exclusively on Apple Silicon Macs — M-series chips, no Intel. That's a hard hardware cutoff that excludes a meaningful chunk of the installed Mac base, and there's no iOS version or Android equivalent in sight. For now, it deepens OpenAI's foothold inside Apple's ecosystem while also stepping on territory Apple has reserved for Siri, which targets the same message-reading and drafting use cases.
Whether Apple can — or will — pull the plug on third-party message access is an open question. It has done it before: the Beeper Mini app, which brought iMessage to Android, was shut out in 2023. The current lawsuit adds another layer of tension, as Forbes frames it, the plugin directly tests Apple's privacy-first brand promise at the ecosystem level.
Should you enable it?
If you're a ChatGPT Work or Codex subscriber on an Apple Silicon Mac and trust OpenAI's data handling, the feature could genuinely save time — especially for catching up on missed threads. But handing an AI chatbot Full Disk Access is a significant step, and the permission requirements are worth reading carefully before you tap Allow.
