ChatGPT Can Now Read and Send Your iPhone Texts — Here's What That Means

What the new plugin does

OpenAI has released a new add-on ("plugin") that connects ChatGPT directly to the Messages app on your iPhone or Mac. Once it's turned on, you can ask ChatGPT to look through your texts, sort them, draft replies, or even send messages for you — instead of you doing all the typing yourself.

For example, you could ask it to look at yesterday's conversations and suggest a good follow-up reply to send to a friend, or to dig back through old messages to find a piece of information someone sent you weeks ago. It's available for both regular personal ChatGPT use and the work-focused version of the product, so it works for individuals and for companies alike.

The privacy trade-off

To make this work, the plugin needs something called "Full Disk Access" on your device — a broad permission that lets it read files it wouldn't normally be allowed to touch. OpenAI says the plugin doesn't build a giant permanent copy of all your texts, that it works locally on your own device rather than uploading everything, and that ChatGPT only looks at messages when you specifically ask it to.

That said, it's still not entirely clear exactly what information ends up being remembered or stored by ChatGPT after it processes a request like this. That grey area is exactly why privacy-minded users are being cautious about turning the feature on.

The one setting to be careful with

The plugin lets you allow ChatGPT to send texts automatically without asking you to double-check each one first. OpenAI itself is warning people against turning that setting on, because it removes your last chance to catch a mistake before a message goes out under your name. In other words: convenient, but worth thinking twice about before switching on "auto-send."