Meta’s Muse is creepy, but maybe not for the reasons you think
Muse probably can’t ‘see’ your notifications. But it also has no idea how it works.
Muse probably can’t ‘see’ your notifications. But it also has no idea how it works.
byTerrence O'Brien Sep 19, 2026, 4:44 PM EDT
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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
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Terrence O'Brienis the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
Meta’s Muse is apparently an effective AI assistant, but one that’s a little creepy. Part of that is because of its new Mac app, which can access Messages, Calendar, and Notes. But for all its smarts, Muse doesn’t actually know how to describe itself. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted on Threads screenshots of an interaction he had with Muse in which the assistant asks him some questions about a conversation he was having in Messages.
The problem is that Aten says he didn’t give Muse access to his messages. When asked how it knew about the contents of his messages, Muse replied, “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your texts.” Aten continued to push, asking how Muse was receiving message previews, it didn’t have a good answer. “Honest answer: I can’t give you the exact plumbing,” it said. “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.
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Obviously, not great.
Meta Superintelligence Labs’ David Singleton chimed in below the post to try to explain. First, he walks through all the permissions Muse needs to read messages, including granting the Mac app full disk access. He states that the features are opt-in. The more interesting part comes in towards the end of the thread in which Singleton says that Muse, “does not watch notifications on your Mac, but rather syncs data from Messages only after the user has specifically enabled access.”
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