Apple Moves to Rein In Full Disk Access on macOS as AI Agents Raise the Stakes
Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS
Apple says some developers are abusing Full Disk Access — a permission meant to let backup apps work — in ways that expose files, mail, messages, and browsing history without users fully understanding the risk. The company will add new controls requiring explicit user action before granting this extraordinary level of access, citing the growing autonomy of AI agents as a key reason.
As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.
- eviks
> We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities
> Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls
That's because you don't really. Just like you don't give users "powerfulf" controls, so instead they have to resort to dumb ones like "Full disk"
For example, if you care about "mail, messages, and even browsing history", why isn't there a subset of "full disk access except for reading mail/messages/browsing history"? Or if vibe code have some basic disk sizing functionality to ask questions about your files, why can't it have a more granular "full disk read only access for file sizes only" so that your vibe coded disk visualization app can't destroy your data or your privacy
> can only do so with very explicit user action.
Which is in the same vein and is mostly useless, just another inconvenient bump
- moecables
IMHO, it's good to add more specific controls for this. After reading this, I went and checked my list of app with full disk access:
- Ghostty (fine, it's my terminal)
- Alfred (fine, I use it for searching everywhere)
Then I have a few turned off:
- Spotify (why does it need full disk access) ??
- Gemini (nope, don't need it to know everything about my
computer)
- liuliu
I don’t quite understand why people complains this is bad for AI agents. Local Code (https://releases.drawthings.ai/p/public-beta-of-local-code-b...) doesn’t require full disk access, when you ask the agent to deal with some files it doesn’t have access to, the built-in ‘permit’ tool will trigger the OS folder grant interface and that information will be recorded both by Apple and by the app so it can be revoked later if you want. That allows you to not give full disk access to the app to be useful.
- mrkpdl
I would like the ability to see which specific folders I have granted access to on an app by app basis. And edit. It’s not clear to me how you revoke an app’s individual folder access after you have granted it.
- post_break
One update away to revoking Full Disk Access in the future. This commercial has come full circle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqZ8AqmLPY
- Kim_Bruning
Am I getting old? "full disk access" used to be something that's supposed to be normal; if you're the owner of the machine.
- PeanutOS
This week, I formatted my entire Mac fleet (an iMac Pro and four MacBooks), and now neither AI agent runs natively. I am using LIMA (https://lima-vm.io) to isolate them in a sandbox, exposing only a repository. I lose some integration, but the peace of mind is worth it.
- tiku
Any tips on the screenshot utility not getting disk access? Must be related because since macOS 27 it gets a no write permission error.