ChatGPT can now search years of your texts—but security experts are most worried about the people who never opted in

ChatGPT no longer has to wait for people to copy and paste their texts into the chatbot.

Now it can search for them itself.

A new Apple Messages plugin lets ChatGPT search old texts, summarize group chats, draft replies, and send messages from a Mac.

The person installing it has to approve the access—but everyone else in those conversations does not.

That is opening a new front in the privacy and security debate about AI agents as they gain access to increasingly sensitive parts of people’s digital lives.

Security and privacy expert Paul Walsh calls the Messages integration “one of the most dangerous things I have seen in technology” and warns it can function like spyware for people who depend on private communications.

But according to OpenAI, the plugin runs locally by default, only reads Messages when a user explicitly asks it to, and does not automatically upload or index a user’s message history.

But one person’s decision to opt in can make years of conversations searchable by AI, including messages from people who never agreed to give it access.

Explaining what would happen if he enabled the integration himself, Walsh told Fortune : “Every single person I send a message to through iMessage will never know that I have a third party inside that application, and they will never be notified.” For people who deliberately use encrypted messaging for sensitive conversations, he said, “it becomes dangerous.” OpenAI rolled out the plugin last week for ChatGPT on Mac, allowing users to search iMessage, SMS, and RCS conversations, catch up on threads, draft replies, and send them through Apple Messages.

Users must explicitly install the plugin and grant ChatGPT several macOS permissions, including AppleScript, Accessibility, and Full Disk Access.

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT does not create an index of a user’s Messages or begin reading conversations simply because the plugin has been enabled.

The company added that a user must make a request that specifically seeks information from Messages before ChatGPT will access them.

Walsh’s concern isn’t that ChatGPT has cracked Apple’s end-to-end encryption.

Instead, it centers on what happens after an encrypted message reaches its intended recipient and becomes readable on that person’s Mac.