Put the question to Meta's Muse — how does it know what your text messages say? — and it will offer an explanation. Put it again and a different explanation comes back. According to Meta, neither one is right.
That is the awkward conclusion drawn from an exchange that Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, shared on Threads. His screenshots show Muse beginning to quiz him about a conversation he was carrying on in Messages. Aten says he had never granted Muse access to those messages.
Naturally, he wanted to know how it found out. “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your texts,” Muse told him.
Aten pressed further: how was it getting message previews in the first place? Muse had no clear answer. “Honest answer: I can’t give you the exact plumbing,” it replied. “What I know is that the paired Mac app exposes notifications as one of its capabilities, and they arrive to me through the device sync.”
An assistant that discusses your private texts while confessing it doesn’t understand its own wiring does not inspire confidence.
Meta says Muse got its own story wrong
David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs turned up in the replies to clarify. He laid out the permissions Muse requires before it can read messages — among them granting the Mac app full disk access — and stressed that the features are opt-in.
The most telling detail arrived toward the end of his thread. Muse, according to Singleton, “does not watch notifications on your Mac, but rather syncs data from Messages only after the user has specifically enabled access.”
In his reading, the issue wasn’t that Muse had been quietly reading Aten’s texts. It was that Muse had no real understanding of what it was describing:
“In the conversation with his Muse in Jason’s screenshots, when Muse said it synced ‘device notifications’, it was confused about how to explain the feature and gave an incorrect explanation. That’s on us. We apologize for the incorrect response from Muse and we’re working to improve Muse’s understanding of its own internals so that it gives correct answers to questions about how it functions more consistently.”
The Mac app is where the unease comes from
Most reports describe Muse as a capable assistant. The unsettling part is its new Mac app, which can dip into Messages, Calendar and Notes. Handing that much personal data to any software is a big ask — more so when the software cannot accurately describe how that data reaches it.
Meta’s account is only partly comforting. If Singleton has it right, the permissions worked as intended and Muse simply fabricated a convincing-sounding mechanism when confronted with a difficult question.
That matches a pattern we’ve seen before. Chatbots don’t reveal their secrets. They tell you what you want to hear — and this time Muse did exactly that about its own access to your inbox.