Meta says Muse gave "incorrect" answer on message access

The exchange began when Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted Threads screenshots of Muse asking him questions about a conversation he was having in Messages. Aten says he had not given Muse access to his messages, and when he asked how it knew, Muse said it had seen notification previews rather than his message history, then admitted it couldn't explain the "exact plumbing."

David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs responded in the same thread. He walked through the permissions Muse needs, including full disk access for the Mac app, and said the features are opt-in. His explanation places the blame not on illicit reading but on Muse's grasp of its own design: in those screenshots, when Muse said it synced "device notifications," it was confused and gave an incorrect explanation. Singleton apologized and said Meta is working to improve Muse's understanding of its own internals.

The episode seems to highlight a narrower problem than surveillance: an assistant that is effective but unreliable when describing what it does. Whether that reassures users may hinge on whether Meta's promised fix makes Muse's self-descriptions consistently accurate, since the original concern was whether it could see messages Aten never granted access to.