Meta's Muse AI assistant expands to Mac with computer-control features

Meta’s AI assistant app, Muse, is now available on Mac. On the new desktop app, Muse can interact with a user’s files, messages, calendar, notes, and mail, all within their native applications. The Mac launch follows Muse’s debut on mobile and the web earlier this month, when it quickly rose to the top of the U.S. App Store charts. As on other platforms, users control what Muse can access on their Mac on an opt-in basis, and Meta says the app will always ask for approval before performing sensitive actions.

The desktop release lands amid intensifying competition among consumer-facing AI agents, which many in the industry believe will shape the future of computing. That shift is disrupting the app industry and software-as-a-service businesses, and, the article notes, could eventually extend to hardware like the iPhone. Beyond Muse, all the major AI players now offer consumer-facing agentic AI, and some agents have found traction by letting people interact with them over text message. Poke, one of the earlier breakout hits in that category, was acquired by Cognition in July. Another AI assistant frequently discussed in tech circles, Instinct, is said to be raising more funding at a $10 billion valuation.

For now, the race is over who can capture the most consumer market share in agentic AI, and quickly — pushing both Muse and Instinct to ship new features at a rapid pace. Both rolled out voice calling this same week. Announcing the Mac app on X, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “The team is shipping fast.”

Why it matters

Muse’s expansion to desktop, where it can act directly inside a user’s files and apps, signals that the fight among AI assistants is shifting from chat interfaces toward agents that operate a person’s whole computer — raising the stakes for whoever controls that layer of the operating system.