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September 11, 2026

Meta’s Muse Wants Your Life—But Can It Win Your Trust?

Meta sees Muse as its route from chatbot novelty to a mass-market assistant that acts on people’s behalf; critics see a product whose promise of convenience demands an exceptional level of trust from a company still carrying deep privacy baggage.

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday as its most ambitious consumer AI push yet: a personal agent meant to send emails, plan trips, shop, fill forms and keep working after a user closes the app. In announcing it, Mark Zuckerberg called Muse an agent that “understands your goals and works 24/7 to get things done for you.”

The company’s larger pitch is personal “superintelligence,” not another chatbot. Muse is available in the US through iOS, Android, the web and WhatsApp, with support for Meta’s AI glasses planned. It can connect to services including Gmail, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Shopify and OpenTable, learning from a user’s activity to make suggestions and carry out tasks. Meta offers a free tier, plus $20-a-month Power and $100-a-month Maximum plans; Zuckerberg said the free allowance reaches 100 million tokens a week.

That ambition creates the central problem. For Muse to book a table, pay for goods or manage calendars, users must hand Meta access to data and services far more intimate than a social feed. Meta says each agent operates in a dedicated cloud virtual machine, while a separate Sentinel system governs whether actions are allowed, blocked or require approval. Users can also opt out of having model queries used by Meta, and the company says it is building a confidential workspace that Meta itself cannot inspect.

Skeptics argue those safeguards will be judged against the company’s history, not its product documentation. Muse arrived less than two weeks after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over social-media consumer harms, while past privacy controversies—from Cambridge Analytica to FTC action—remain hard to separate from any request for deeper access.

Early demand offers Meta some encouragement, if not a verdict. Sensor Tower data put US iOS downloads above 83,000, lifting Muse from fourth place on Wednesday to No. 2 in the App Store charts. Yet the debut lagged Meta’s own Meta AI app and Threads launches, and its Android app ranked No. 338 in Google Play’s Productivity category.

Muse may be easy to try. The harder task is persuading people that the agent should be allowed to act.

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