Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent that acts on your behalf

Less than two weeks after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over social media’s consumer harms, the company introduced Muse, its biggest bet yet on consumer AI — and one that asks for far more trust than social media ever did. Muse is a personal AI agent for U.S. users that connects to email, calendars, payments, and everyday apps for health, shopping, dining, and more, aiming to actually complete tasks rather than just answer questions.

Meta says Muse can send emails, book travel, lower bills, fill out forms, turn recipe reels into grocery lists, and make purchases using Link by Stripe for checkout, with Shopify’s Shop Pay and 1Password integrations coming soon. Users connect apps one at a time to keep opt-in explicit. The agent runs on Meta’s Muse Spark model and ships with built-in connectors, with more planned over time; if a desired service lacks a public API, Muse can use stored credentials or fall back to browsing it directly.

Muse will launch via the web, iOS and Android apps, and WhatsApp chats, with AI glasses support coming later. It’s free, with two paid tiers — Power at $20/month and Maximum at $100/month — for heavier use, though Meta expects most users to stay on the free tier; the app shows a usage meter and warns before it runs out.

Meta says Muse runs in a dedicated, secure virtual machine with its own browser, isolated from a separate Sentinel agent at the system level, so Muse can’t see passwords or payment methods, and Meta says it doesn’t share Muse conversations or data with its ads systems — claims laid out in a companion technical post that Meta itself says will need deeper outside security review. That reassurance is complicated by Meta’s own track record: FTC settlements in 2011 and a record $5 billion penalty in 2019, a 2023 FTC charge for violating that 2019 order, exposed user passwords discovered in 2019, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal all precede the $18 billion settlement and other still-pending lawsuits over harm to minors.

Why it matters

Muse asks users to hand Meta more direct access to money and personal accounts than any of its past products, making consumer trust — not technical capability — the real test of whether the agent succeeds.