An Ex-Apple Engineer Is Building an AI Agent That Lives Inside iMessage

Your next AI assistant might not come as an app at all. It might just... text you.

WHAT HAPPENED

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (Power On newsletter, Sept 27, 2026), Nikhil Gupta — the ex-Apple engineer who worked on Apple Intelligence and Siri — is launching a startup called 'szn' in October. The twist: instead of another app to download, szn is an AI agent that lives inside iMessage itself. No separate app at first — you just talk to it in a conversation.

HOW 'SZN' WORKS

Through an iMessage chat, szn can browse websites, complete purchases and communicate with vendors on your behalf. It's built around a personal identity model: each customer gets a virtual assistant with its own name, email address and phone number — a digital representative that can contact others and reply independently, even when you're away. It's wired into Apple's ecosystem too: shared Apple Notes, Find My and your iCloud files. On privacy, Gupta says each customer gets a dedicated model with controls to limit data use, and your personal information won't be used for training.

THE CROWDED AGENT RACE

szn is jumping into a fast-growing fight. Instinct, from San Francisco's Spear Street Technology, works across iMessage, WhatsApp and SMS and raised a $250M Series B at a $2.5B valuation in late August. Meta's Muse launched on WhatsApp in the US on September 8 (Canada on September 18). SpaceXAI's Grok Bot passed 400,000 users in its first month. And OpenAI is rumored to unveil a persistent agent codenamed "O" at its DevDay on September 29.

WHY IT MATTERS

The agent wars are converging on one insight: the best AI assistant is the one you don't have to open. If szn works as promised, talking to an agent will feel no different from texting a friend. The big question mark is Apple itself — it has shut down third-party services built on iMessage before, and Gurman wrote: "We'll see how the tech giant reacts this time."