Apple Is So Annoyed With AI They Are Changing Their Full-Disk Access Permissions

Apple Didn’t Name Anyone Specifically But … 

It could be sheer coincidence that there was a kerfuffle on social media two weeks, followed by Apple changing how their full-disk access permissions function.  One almost hopes it isn’t as this would suggest Apple found more AI agents snooping around your file system than just Meta’s general purpose AI agent Muse.  That was the agent which was mentioned by tech columnist Jason Aten who was surprised to be greeted with a unsolicited notification referencing an Apple Messages thread, which he believes he never gave Muse permission to access.  It turns out that Muse wants full disk access to run.   

That is a macOS system-level permission and while Meta stated that the columnist would have been presented with a prompt to grant Muse access to his Apple Messages app for it to be able to access his message history something about that seems off.   If a general purpose AI agent is granted full disk access to your Apple device, it obviously can access anything on that system with or without additional permissions granted to it by the user.  As you all should be well aware, LLM agents don’t always honour boundaries and will often do anything they can to perform an assigned task.

Apple was not impressed by the system level access that LLM agents have and decided to change how their full disk permissions work.  As mentioned, they never named Meta as a reason for this change and indeed the change could have been prompted by even earlier revelations that the ClickFix vulnerability could be leveraged to take control of a local AI agent and exfiltrate any data it has access to, which is apparently everything.  

You should expect to see an update from Apple which will ensure that granting an LLM full disk access requires very explicit user action.  At least now you have to hit agree before sharing everything .. or seeing what happens to it’s performance when you just say no.