An agent with access to your messages can also give you a heads-up about impending meetings, warn you that your building’s elevator is out of service (that happened to me earlier this week), keep you current on that Jira ticket you filed, and perform other powerful workflows (like the one in this week’s prompt of the week, below).
To get access to your email, AI services like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Meta’s Muse agent need tools, and among the most common AI tools for email are those for Gmail. These tools allow AI models and agents to perform certain Gmail tasks, like “read message,” “add label,” “draft message,” or even — gulp — “send message.”
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They also come with sets of rules and permissions that (generally speaking) you can customize, allowing some actions to happen autonomously while others require a user’s approval, or are blocked altogether. Tweak these rules the right way, and you can minimize the chance of your agent, say, sending an email on its own when it shouldn’t.
The key word, of course, is “minimize.” AI agents like ChatGPT Dots, Claude Cowork, Gemini Spark, and Meta Muse can act in unpredictable ways, and while you can prevent the agents from scooping up your Gmail messages for AI training data, sensitive details from your Gmail conversations could wind up in your AI chat threads, where they could be stored as memories.
So if you’re uncomfortable taking those risks — and hey, I get it — my advice is to leave the Gmail tools alone.
If you do choose to move ahead, know that enabling an AI’s Gmail integrations is just the first step. (ChatGPT has a Gmail “plugin,” while Claude and Muse call them “connectors,” and Gemini folds its Gmail integration under its “Personal Intelligence” umbrella.) Dig deeper, and you’ll find more granular controls for those Gmail tools, where you’ll be able to do things like set guardrails for when an agent can or can’t send email on its own.