Ex-Apple engineer prepares to launch szn, an AI agent that lives inside iMessage

Bloomberg Power On author Mark Gurman reports that Nikhil Gupta, a former Apple engineer who worked on Apple Intelligence and Siri, is preparing to launch an AI assistant called szn in October. Rather than shipping another standalone assistant app, the product lives directly inside iMessage.

At launch, szn runs through an iMessage conversation with no separate app required. According to the report, it works by browsing websites, completing purchases and communicating with vendors on the user's behalf from inside the chat thread.

The centrepiece is what the company calls a personal identity model: every customer's assistant has its own name, email address and phone number, and can contact other people and reply independently as a digital representative of its owner. It is designed not only to answer the owner's questions but to act for them in the outside world.

On data use, Gupta says the product includes privacy controls. The report states that each customer gets a dedicated model and that szn will not use personal information for training, a deliberate contrast with many cloud-based assistants.

Tight integration with Apple's ecosystem is another selling point. The report says szn supports shared Apple Notes, Find My and files stored in iCloud, giving the assistant direct reach into data and device features users already have.

The category is already crowded. The report points to Instinct, an invite-only personal AI agent from San Francisco's Spear Street Technology that works over iMessage, WhatsApp and SMS and raised a $250 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation in late August; Meta's Muse, launched September 8 in the US and September 18 in Canada, which messages users on WhatsApp from a dedicated cloud VM; and SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, an always-on agent with a cloud computer per user that entered beta on August 11 and passed 400,000 users in its first month. The report also notes leaks pointing to OpenAI's September 29 DevDay in San Francisco unveiling a persistent agent codenamed "O".

The biggest unknown is Apple itself. The report notes that Apple has previously shut down third-party services built around iMessage, and quotes Gurman saying, "We'll see how the tech giant reacts this time." A product that runs on top of iMessage and sends messages and makes calls as the user sits squarely in a sensitive spot under platform rules.

Three things to watch next: whether szn actually ships in October as planned; how much privacy and compliance overhead the one-email-and-phone-number-per-assistant identity model creates in multi-party conversations; and whether Apple chooses to tolerate, absorb or restrict agents that piggyback on its own messaging network.