Meta has denied claims that its AI agent, Muse, reads users' private messages without explicit consent. This follows a journalist's assertion that Muse accessed his private messages even with the relevant settings on his Mac turned off. Andy Stone, Meta's Vice President of Communications, stated that Muse's message integration on Mac is entirely opt-in, requiring users to enable both "Full Disk Access" and "Messages Connector" to read message content. David Singleton, an executive at Meta Superintelligence Labs, also explained that Muse requires three steps of application-level permissions and macOS system-level protections to read messages, which cannot be bypassed even if there were an application vulnerability. Meta also stated that the AI's explanation described by the journalist was incorrect, and the AI was in a "confused" state at the time.