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Oct 23, 2026
Meta’s Muse raced to 10 million users, but trust may decide whether it lasts
Meta sees Muse as the start of a lucrative network of personal agents that can shop and work on users’ behalf. Critics and analysts see a more fragile proposition: rapid adoption is not the same as trust, especially when the service asks users to hand over more data.
Muse launched in September as Meta’s personal AI agent, designed to handle tasks from email and calendars to travel and shopping. It quickly climbed to the top of U.S. app-store rankings, helped not only by Meta’s vast distribution network but by an aggressive paid-marketing campaign.1
Within 40 days, Sensor Tower counted 10.9 million downloads, including 10.2 million in the United States — a threshold reached by only 11 other apps. The early engagement figures gave Meta something more substantial than a launch-week headline: 2.5 million daily active users by October 16, while 14-day retention stood at 23%, ahead of the cited average for rival AI apps.1
At Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada had set up Muse. Meta’s commercial pitch is already clear: more than a quarter of users are shopping through the agent, with purchases averaging above $200. The company plans to keep Muse free for most consumers and take a cut of transactions, while eventually charging power users for more advanced access.2
Zuckerberg’s larger ambition is a “Muse network,” in which users’ agents transact with businesses and communicate with friends’ and families’ agents. Meta says the service could ultimately generate more revenue per user than its existing family of apps — but it first has to make the economics work. Zuckerberg acknowledged Muse remains “very compute-intensive to run,” promising a more than tenfold improvement in cost efficiency next year.2
The fault line is trust. Forrester analyst Kate Winick said Muse becomes more effective as it receives more information, but “overall trust in Meta remains low.”3 That concern is sharpened by reports of agents exposing private content and a $25 billion New Mexico judgment over Meta’s handling of users’ data, even as the company insists its security tools can protect it.4
Meta’s CFO Susan Li offered the bluntest version of the company’s wager: “Agents are going to be an important part of how reality evolves, and everyone is just going to have to adapt.”4 The next test is whether users and businesses agree.