ChatGPT macOS app suspected of reading entire disk; changing its permissions froze the whole Mac

saijanai · reddit · 2026-09-05

A user filed a high-severity bug report against the new ChatGPT.app on macOS: while trying to change the app's file-access permissions in System Settings, the entire Mac froze and required a hard power-off. More troubling, the session had claimed it had no local memory of a topic, yet found a matching folder on an arbitrary external drive — suggesting the app read the disk despite lacking permission. Attempting to manually restrict access in privacy settings triggered the system-wide freeze. The user warns forced power-offs risk data loss or filesystem corruption; OpenAI support has escalated to a specialist.

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