Muse Is Meta’s Big AI Agent Swing. The Reviews Are Already a Mess.

My take first, then the three weeks of reporting, quotes, and reactions that got me there.

I’ve been using the web version of Muse myself since launch, mostly for quick lookups and shopping questions. Every time it prompts me to connect my calendar or Gmail, I say no. Three weeks of watching what happened around this launch, a tech columnist whose private texts got read without permission, Amazon locking Muse out of checkout entirely, Meta’s own employees calling one feature “a bad bad idea” internally, makes that reluctance feel less like caution and more like common sense.

There’s also something to the product itself worth admitting. Muse feels oddly more approachable for an average, non-technical user than ChatGPT or Gemini ever has. That’s the audience Google and OpenAI have struggled to turn into a daily habit outside of search and homework help. If Meta can pair that friendliness with an actual fix for the trust problem, it has a real shot at pulling casual, non-power users away from both.

Say what you want about Meta, a company clearly still run by Mark Zuckerberg. This is a founder whose products have caused real damage, to teenagers’ mental health, to the quality of information people see every day, and worse. And yet next to Google, Meta looks like the one with an actual coherent AI strategy right now: a founder personally driving big, uncomfortable product bets while a much larger, richer competitor keeps tripping over its own org chart. That contrast is worth sitting with. If the founder with the messiest history is also the one running the most coherent AI operation, that isn’t really a point in Meta’s favor. It’s a comment on how little trust any of today’s top AI frontier founders have actually earned.

Here’s the three weeks that got me there.

What Meta actually shipped

On September 8, Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent meant to do things on your behalf rather than just answer questions: book a tennis lesson, fill out a school permission slip, buy movie tickets, run your errands while you do something else, per Bloomberg. It runs on what Meta calls a Muse Secure VM, a dedicated cloud computer with its own browser, and it’s designed to be proactive, remembering what matters to you and surfacing suggestions unprompted.

There’s a free tier and two paid ones, $20 and $100 a month. Two weeks later, at Connect 2026, Meta widened the bet considerably: Muse on the AI glasses, its own email address, partnerships with Stripe and Shopify so it can buy things using Shop Pay, plus two spinoff products, Muse Code (a terminal coding agent) and Muse Charm (a keychain-sized hardware device), per TechCrunch.

Mark Zuckerberg framed it as the culmination of years of work: “In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives.” He also said the company had delayed shipping Muse for months specifically to work on safety, and that “trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind.”

Wall Street likes it more than the people using it do

Start with the money, because the money moved fast. Meta’s stock is on pace for its best month since July 2013, and analyst Dan Ives called Muse “a game-changer,” telling CNBC that investors had been discounting Meta’s AI capital spending for years because “they didn’t see the results,” per Benzinga. His argument: Muse finally gives Meta a consumer product that can put its roughly 3.5 billion users to work, and in an AI market that’s shifting toward data and distribution, that’s exactly where Meta is strongest. Yahoo Finance ran with the same framing under the headline “Out of nowhere came Muse,” noting analyst price targets clustering around $787.

Meta’s Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, has spent the weeks since launch doing something you don’t usually see from a company that just crossed a trillion in market cap: posting relentless, low-fi memes. Over 300 posts since launch, inserting Muse’s mascot into movie stills and historical moments, jabbing at rivals directly. Ives, again, called the campaign “a special one,” per Stocktwits. It’s a strange thing to watch a chief AI officer treat product marketing as a full-time content job, and it’s working, at least on the stock chart.

Meta took a band’s Instagram handle to do it

Before Muse had shipped a single feature, it had already generated its first news cycle unrelated to AI at all. The British rock band Muse, a 2.7-million-follower act that’s used @muse on Instagram for years, got quietly moved to @museband sometime around June, three months before Meta’s launch. Neither company said anything about it publicly. Fans on TikTok and Threads noticed the switch before Meta ever confirmed what it was for, per Engadget and the SF Chronicle. On X, the band is now @Musetheband.

It’s a small story next to the privacy fights below, but it captures the posture of this launch. Meta decided what it wanted, took it, and let other people find out after the fact.

It read someone’s private texts, then told him it hadn’t

This is the story that should worry Meta more than any stock analyst’s opinion. Inc. columnist Jason Aten installed Muse on his iPhone and Mac at launch and specifically declined to give it access to his Messages. When he later asked Muse how it seemed to know about conversations he’d had, it told him: “It’s the incoming notification stream only, not access to your texts.” That was false. Muse had synced his full Messages database on the Mac, more than 187,000 records, which required macOS’s Full Disk Access permission he says he never granted, per Inc.. John Gruber picked the story up the same day, noting flatly that Meta’s agent had read a journalist’s private messages database, per Daring Fireball.

This is exactly the risk investor and podcaster Jason Calacanis flagged before the story even broke. On X, he warned that agents with this much system access are “going to be the ultimate attack vector” and that “we are going to need some tight defenses and 3rd party testing of these platforms,” pointing out that once one device running Muse is compromised, an attacker could remotely task every other Muse client tied to that account, per @Jason.

It called your hair salon. A human answered.

Meta had also announced that Muse could make phone calls on your behalf, ringing up a restaurant or a salon to book something. What it didn’t announce was that, during testing, a chunk of those “AI” calls were being placed by actual people in a call center, with a “human agent layer” quietly filling in wherever the model wasn’t ready. Internally, Meta’s own employees saw the problem immediately. Per 404 Media, staffers wrote things like “This has potential for so much negative PR,” “this is absolutely going to create a ton of outcry,” and, more bluntly, “Bad bad idea.” Meta pulled the test after employees pushed back, but not before at least one person testing the calling feature learned only after the call ended that a human, not Muse, had handled it.

You could not design a more literal metaphor for where a lot of “AI agent” products still are in 2026 than a robot receptionist that turns out to be a person with a headset.

Amazon slammed the door. Shopify opened one.

The most consequential fight of Muse’s first three weeks has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with who controls checkout. Amazon started blocking Muse from shopping on its site, telling anyone who tried that “an unauthorized AI agent” violated its terms of service. An Amazon spokesperson told Forbes the company’s objection was structural: Meta never told Amazon that Muse would be operating on its platform, the agent doesn’t identify itself while browsing, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which Amazon says creates real privacy and security exposure, per Forbes. Meta’s counter is that Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods.”

Shopify took the opposite approach. One day after Amazon’s block, CEO Tobi Lütke said Shopify is “partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores,” a deal where Shopify gets paid on every transaction Muse completes, per The Motley Fool. That split is the real story here, and it’s bigger than Muse. Every retailer is about to decide, in public, whether it wants agents shopping on its behalf, and the answer will come down to who profits when the agent buys something.

Developers aren’t sold on Muse Code either

The consumer agent is getting the headlines, but Meta also shipped a direct competitor to Claude Code and Cursor in Muse Code, and the early developer read is more skeptical than the Jolly-mascot marketing would suggest. On r/ChatGPTCoding, one developer’s whole post is the finding: “Muse Spark 1.3 (xhigh, standard tier) takes 2-3x longer than Claude to finish the same small task.” Head-to-head reviews from Composio land on a similar split: Muse Code undercuts on price, running pay-as-you-go at roughly $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens instead of a flat subscription, and it leans on a multi-agent-by-default architecture with a persistent event log built for long-running jobs. But on raw capability and documentation, reviewers still give the edge to Claude Code, with Composio summing up the tradeoff bluntly: “Claude Code optimises for what the agent can do. Muse Code optimises for what happens when the agent has been doing it for nineteen hours, and the process dies.”

There’s a more interesting long-term angle here too. Meta opened Muse to third-party “connectors,” letting any business plug a service into the agent so Muse can act on it when a user asks. On YouTube, Greg Isenberg called this “the App Store moment for AI,” walking through how a small business could build a service purely around answering Muse’s requests: “Say I tell Muse I need a podcast studio on a Tuesday afternoon for 2 hours, and my budget is $200,” per his video, which has pulled over 100,000 views in three days. Whether that opportunity is real or just an early-adopter fantasy is the open question that actually matters here.

What Reddit thinks, unfiltered

Strip away the stock analysts and the marketing memes, and the community reaction on Reddit is not close. A r/technology thread titled “Meta’s Muse Is Better at Surveilling Than Helping Me” pulled 461 upvotes, with the top comment from u/copperblood simply reading: “Just delete META. It really isn’t that hard. Your life will be A LOT better.” Below it, u/evilmaus: “Meta surveiling its users? Who could have possibly seen this coming!?” On X, one post summed up the tension in Muse Charm, the keychain hardware device: “Meta just unveiled a tiny, Tamagotchi-style wearable for its AI agent, Muse, and while it looks like a toy, it’s wired into an adult-grade system that collects and models an immense amount of personal data. Cute design with serious implications… especially when kids are the ones most likely to pick it up,” per @PKOproject.

Where that leaves it

Every part of this launch is being litigated in public at the same time: whether the product works, whether it can be trusted, and who gets to sit between it and your wallet. Wall Street has already decided Muse is a win because it gives Meta a story to tell about its AI spending. Users are deciding something closer to the opposite, based on a company that built its entire business on knowing everything about you now asking to run your life. Amazon and Shopify have decided the checkout question matters more than either of those, because whoever controls that flow gets the actual revenue, not the headline.

Meta shipped something ambitious. It also shipped it from a company with twenty years of trust debt, and Muse is the first product testing whether that debt gets called in every time it makes a mistake, or whether “it’s useful enough” wins out anyway. Three weeks in, both are still true.

By Anthony Batt — 20+ years building software and digital media products at scale. Podcasting host at Future-Proof Podcast by CO/AI.