OpenAI has released an Apple Messages plugin for ChatGPT that can search, draft, analyse and send messages on a Mac — and the messages it reaches include RCS, not just iMessage. That last detail is the one worth pausing on if you are on Android: RCS is how your texts to an Apple contact travel now, so a plugin nobody asked you about can end up reading threads you are in. The price of admission on the Mac side is Full Disk Access, which is about as broad as macOS permissions get.
What the ChatGPT Apple Messages plugin can reach
Per MacRumors, which reported OpenAI’s announcement, the plugin installs from the ChatGPT Plugins interface and is listed under Public. Once running it can access iMessages, SMS messages and RCS messages, and it works by driving the Mac through AppleScript and Accessibility settings.
OpenAI’s own suggested prompts give the flavour of what it is for: checking your calendar and replying to someone with times you are free, surfacing follow-ups from yesterday’s messages, pulling birthdays out of Messages and adding them to your calendar, and finding likely spam you can delete. Useful things, on the face of it — the sort of triage nobody enjoys doing by hand.
Availability is narrower than the headline suggests. It runs in ChatGPT Work and Codex within the desktop ChatGPT app, and does not work in ordinary ChatGPT chats. It requires an Apple silicon Mac, and on that hardware it is open to all ChatGPT users. MacRumors also notes that Apple’s involvement in the plugin’s development is unknown — worth remembering that Apple and OpenAI are currently in court, with Apple suing OpenAI over theft of trade secrets. This is not a partnership feature.
What you actually hand over
To make the integration work, ChatGPT needs Full Disk Access in System Settings, plus access to contact names and to automation tools. Full Disk Access is not a messages permission. It is macOS’s blanket override that lets an application read the protected areas of your drive, and it exists precisely because the Messages database is one of the things Apple otherwise walls off. Grant it and you are not authorising access to the four conversations you wanted summarised; you are authorising access to the archive.
Sending is treated more carefully. A message goes out only with user approval by default, and OpenAI explicitly warns against granting persistent approval — its own advice is to keep confirming each send rather than switching the check off. Take that advice at face value: a vendor telling you not to disable its safety prompt is telling you something about what happens when you do.
The RCS part is everyone else’s problem too
Here is the angle that does not show up in the Mac coverage. Message-history access has always been a consent question with a hole in it, because a thread has two ends and only one of them installs anything. What is different now is scale and scope. Reading your own iMessage archive was, until recently, a fairly niche thing to automate. An assistant that can be pointed at the whole database in plain language, and that is being marketed for exactly that, changes how routine it becomes.
And RCS widens the blast radius beyond Apple’s ecosystem. Apple’s own Messages User Guide for Mac confirms that with an iPhone signed into the same Apple Account, SMS, MMS and RCS texts appear on the Mac too — subject to carrier, country and region. So if your friend has that set up, the RCS you send them from an Android phone lands in the same Messages store this plugin reads. You never saw a permission dialog, because the dialog was on their machine. Nothing here is a security flaw — it is working as designed — but it is a reminder that “my messages are encrypted in transit” says nothing about what happens to them once they land on the other person’s computer.
If you use Messages on a Mac and you install this, the honest framing is that you are granting a cloud AI service standing access to every conversation you have ever had there, including other people’s words, in exchange for calendar triage and spam sorting. That may well be a trade worth making. It is just not the trade the feature description implies.
Source: OpenAI’s announcement, via MacRumors
