Elon Musk has a talent for turning product launches into cultural events, but his latest move around X’s new messaging system—Chat, often referred to as X Chat—has a sharper edge. In essence, he is signalling that X will invite outsiders to probe the security of the new chat stack and, in time, expose key parts of the underlying code to scrutiny. It sounds like the sort of bravado Silicon Valley loves: “Bring your best engineers; we welcome the test.” Yet in private messaging, such a pledge is not merely marketing. It shifts the debate from claims to evidence. If the internals are truly opened, users, researchers and even regulators can examine whether X’s “secure chat” is built on solid ground or on rhetoric.
Why “secure messaging” is not a slogan
Most educated users understand the broad idea of encryption: messages should not be readable to strangers while travelling across the internet. But modern “private messaging” is about more than that. It is about whether anyone—hackers, criminals inside a company, or even a compromised server—can read your conversation later; whether old messages remain safe if a phone is stolen; and whether a platform can quietly change what is happening without users noticing. These details are exactly where many messaging apps succeed or stumble.
X’s Chat launch comes with impressive features—voice and video calls, disappearing messages, file sharing, and a cleaner separation from ads. At the same time, early reporting and commentary have highlighted caveats that matter: certain kinds of “surrounding data” about messages can remain visible (who talked to whom, when, and sometimes from where), and users may not yet have strong tools to independently verify that a conversation has not been tampered with. In plain terms, the system may be private in one dimension and still leaky in another. If Musk is serious about openness, those trade-offs will become measurable, not guesswork.
Open code: trust-builder or flaw-multiplier?
Open-sourcing security-related code is a double-edged decision. On the one hand, it allows independent experts to examine the design, publish critiques, and propose fixes. Mature privacy tools—from widely used encryption libraries to prominent messaging protocols—have benefited from precisely this kind of sunlight. Over time, public review often produces sturdier systems and fewer surprises.
On the other hand, openness can accelerate embarrassment. If a product’s security story is thin, releasing the code does not magically improve it; it simply makes the weaknesses easier to spot. That is why the real test is not the headline announcement but the follow-through: Will X respond quickly to vulnerabilities? Will it invite credible audits? Will it run a serious bug bounty programme? Most importantly, will it communicate honestly—admitting limitations instead of relying on grand assurances?
The regulator’s interest: messaging is now infrastructure
The second audience for Musk’s pledge is government. Messaging platforms are no longer casual utilities; they are social infrastructure. They carry political organising, business coordination, intimate conversations, and increasingly financial activity. In Europe, where rules for large online platforms are tightening, X is already under scrutiny in multiple areas. A messaging stack that also doubles as an entry point to an AI assistant—and later, potentially payments—becomes even more sensitive.
If code and design choices are made visible, regulators and civil-society watchdogs gain something concrete to assess: what data is collected, what is stored, what is shared across features, and how user protections actually work. This can cut both ways. It can help a company demonstrate good faith. It can also make gaps impossible to hand-wave away.
Law enforcement demands: what must platforms reveal?
A recurring public misunderstanding is that law enforcement can simply demand “the messages” and a platform must comply. In reality, most legal regimes require companies to provide data they possess or control, subject to process and safeguards. They do not usually require the impossible. If a system is designed so that only users hold the keys needed to read message content, the provider may be able to hand over some information—account identifiers, time stamps, IP logs, device details—while being unable to provide the actual readable text. This is not always a moral stance; it can be an architectural fact.
The European Union’s e-Evidence framework, which strengthens cross-border orders for electronic evidence, illustrates the direction of travel: faster, clearer legal routes to compel providers to preserve and produce data. But even under tougher rules, the central practical question remains: what does the provider actually have the ability to access? This is why disputes keep arising around platforms like Telegram in various European contexts. Authorities, facing organised crime and terror risks, want more visibility. Platforms argue that they can share what they have, but cannot decrypt what they never had the power to decrypt—without redesigning the system in a way that would weaken everyone’s security.
“We don’t know your password”: the Apple precedent
Apple has offered the clearest real-world example of this principle. Where the company has built services so that it does not hold a usable key, it has argued—sometimes persuasively, sometimes controversially—that it cannot unlock data even if it wants to. The phrase “we don’t know the password” is not always public-relations theatre; it is, at times, the point of the design.
But this defence is not a universal escape hatch. Governments can respond in other ways: by compelling changes to product design; by restricting certain features; by imposing fines for non-compliance where they believe a company is obstructing; or by pushing for client-side scanning and other methods that attempt to reach content before it is encrypted. Each option has costs. Mandated weakening of privacy tends to reduce user trust, increase breach risk, and create precedents that other governments will copy—often with fewer safeguards. The outcome is rarely neat. It becomes a political negotiation over risk: risk of crime versus risk of pervasive vulnerability.
Where X Chat fits: security, AI, and the “super-app” ambition
X is not building messaging in isolation. Chat is increasingly presented as the connective tissue for a bigger platform: conversations, community, creators, customer service, and an AI assistant living in the same place. That is strategically coherent. It is also precisely why trust becomes harder to win.
When AI sits inside messaging, the question shifts from “is my chat encrypted?” to “what happens when I ask the assistant to summarise my messages, search my history, draft replies, or pull in context?” Even if message content stays protected in transit, the moment users invite AI features into the conversation, new pathways open for data to be processed, stored, and reused. The winners will be the platforms that offer clarity and control: simple dashboards that show what is happening, toggles that actually work, and defaults that respect user consent.
The future trend: messaging will split into three lanes
The next few years are likely to produce a clearer segmentation across major apps:
First, the “privacy-first purists.” Signal is the most obvious example: it will continue to attract users who prioritise privacy over features, and it will keep insisting on strong, simple promises. Its challenge is growth without compromise, and sustainability without turning users into a product.
Second, the “mass-market utilities.” WhatsApp will remain dominant where network effects matter most—families, neighbourhoods, small businesses—because trust is often social before it is technical. But WhatsApp’s future is increasingly tied to integration: payments, business messaging, AI helpers, and cross-app ecosystems. Users will tolerate complexity if it is seamless, but will become more sensitive to opaque data sharing.
Third, the “broadcast-plus-communities” lane. Telegram has built a powerful identity around channels, large groups, and a culture of rapid distribution. It will keep thriving where scale and reach matter. But it will also remain at the centre of regulatory conflict, because the same features that help communities can be abused at scale.
X wants to straddle all three lanes—private messaging, public discourse, and AI-first interaction—while turning it into a single platform experience. If it follows through on openness, it could gain credibility fast. If it does not, “open-source” will be remembered as another slogan in the long history of messaging wars.
The bottom line: a new era of verifiable trust
Musk’s tweet matters because it hints at a future where messaging platforms compete not just on features and reach, but on proof. In the coming decade, the apps that dominate private communication will be the ones that can demonstrate, in plain language and in verifiable practice, what they collect, what they can access, what they cannot access, and how they respond when governments come knocking.
In that world, “trust us” will not be enough. The winning promise will be simpler: “Here is how it works—go and check.”