ChatGPT can send your texts now: scope the write access

OpenAI shipped an Apple Messages plug-in for the ChatGPT Mac app today. Connect it and ChatGPT can read your Messages history, search it, draft replies, send them as you, and delete threads. For most small businesses, texts are not a side channel — they are the channel. Scheduling, quotes, "are you still coming," the invoice nudge. This is the first mainstream assistant with write access to that channel, and the approval default is the whole story.

What actually happened

Per TechCrunch and 9to5Mac, the plug-in covers iMessage, SMS, and RCS conversations. It can sort and analyze your message history, compose a follow-up, and send it under your name.

The boundaries are narrower than the headline suggests:

• Apple Silicon Macs only. No Intel machines, no web, no mobile.
• One direction. You drive it from ChatGPT on the Mac. You cannot text ChatGPT from the Messages app to make it do things.
• Available across plan tiers, including ChatGPT Work and Codex.

On sending, approval is required by default. You can waive that per conversation — and OpenAI explicitly warns against it, because waiving removes your last look before a message goes out signed as you. OpenAI told Bloomberg the plug-in runs locally and does not build an index of every message; TechCrunch notes the company has not spelled out what that means in detail.

Why an AI with write access to your texts matters for your business

Read access is a privacy question. Write access is a liability question. A drafted reply that misreads a thread costs you a correction. A sent reply that misquotes a price, confirms an appointment you cannot staff, or answers a customer complaint in the wrong tone costs you the customer — and it arrives with your name on it, in a channel with no undo.

Then there is the device problem. Personal Macs carry business threads. If a team member connects the plug-in on the laptop where your customer texts live, your customer communications just entered a tool your business never provisioned, never scoped, and cannot audit.

We are not telling you to ban it. Sorting a backlog of texts and drafting replies is genuinely useful work. We are telling you to decide the rules before someone else does:

Never grant persistent approval on a customer thread. The per-conversation waiver is fine for your group chat about lunch. It is not fine for the thread where you quote jobs. Separate the business line. A business number in a system you control — with logs — is not the same as an assistant reaching into a personal inbox. Write the one-paragraph policy now. Who may connect it, on which machines, to which conversations. One paragraph beats an incident.

Sources: TechCrunch, 9to5Mac.