Meta wants users to turn to a cute artificial intelligence (AI) “agent” throughout the day to carry out common tasks for them, such as booking flights or doing their shopping.

The company’s new Muse agent shot to the top of the app charts after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg showcased it at a conference last week. Billed as having “no learning curve”, Muse can order groceries online, call customer service, send emails, book appointments and plan travel on a user’s behalf.

Agents are systems which use chatbot-like large language models and reinforcement learning to complete tasks and achieve user-designated goals.

They have come a long way in the past 12 months, from DIY hobbyist projects to more polished personal assistant apps, with “rogue agents” carrying out some high-profile hacks and system breaches along the way. Meta’s entry into the field means they are now starting to hit the mainstream.

Massive spending, second place

Meta has been trying to find its place in the fast-moving world of AI. In 2025 the company spent US$14.3 billion to bring in entrepreneur Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, then comprehensively rebuilt its internal AI systems. All told, the company spent $US72 billion on AI and other capital expenditure in 2025, and expects that figure to double in 2026.

The results have been respectable, but not world-beating. According to one popular ranking, Meta’s latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.2, comes in third behind the frontier Claude and GPT models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

That may not matter. Anthropic and OpenAI are chasing professionals and businesses willing to pay for the most capable model for coding, research and analysis. (OpenAI’s recently launched Dots agents, for example, target a paying clientele wanting help with business tasks.)

Meta also plans to offer some pro-grade paid AI services, but its bread and butter is something else. In the June quarter, 3.6 billion people used Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp every day.

Those people do not need the smartest model. They need one that is easy and approachable.

Meta’s Muse Spark model only needs to be good enough to run the Muse agent. The company is promoting Muse as “built for everyone”, including people who lack experience with technology.

Zuckerberg has said users will soon be able to create a cute anthropomorphic avatar for their Muse agent and video chat with it in real time, too. He also unveiled a keychain-sized device for talking to the agent without a phone.

From checking to delegating

For two decades, Meta’s business model has relied on habit. Notifications, endless feeds and the lure of other people’s approval turned “checking Facebook” or “checking Insta” into a reflex.

Muse is an attempt to build a new reflex. Instead of scrolling, you hand over a chore.

The design invites attachment. Users can give their agent a name and choose how it looks and communicates.

Every successful transaction builds a little more trust. The settings also let users change how often the agent needs to ask permission before acting.

The keys to everything

For now, Muse’s reach is limited. It is only available in the US so far.

It has “connectors” to link your agent to your email, calendars and consumer services such as restaurant bookings, music and shopping. It cannot log into your bank, or medical or tax accounts.

However, Meta plans to add more connectors over time — and roll the product out to international markets.

As people get used to using an agent, they will hand it more tasks and spend more time with it. In the same way social media evolved from actual social networking to an ever-present tool to fill idle moments and manage our moods, AI agents may end up managing the vast galaxy of interfaces that govern modern life.

Muse is also an attempt to head off the threat to Meta’s existing position posed by competing AI agents. If agents take off, they could become users’ main interface with the online world – and gather even more information about users and their preferences than social media platforms do, which whoever owns the agent could then sell to advertisers.

A record that invites scepticism

Meta says privacy is built in to Muse. Each Muse agent runs on its own dedicated virtual machine called Muse Secure VM. This houses both the agent and the person’s data.

Zuckerberg has also promised an optional higher security standard under which even Meta cannot access what is in a user’s agent.

Meta’s record on data privacy gives reason for doubt. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that a consulting firm had harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook users for political profiling. In 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission imposed a US$5 billion penalty on Meta over privacy failures.

Meta has also been accused of designing its products to maximise the amount of time people, including children, spend using them. Earlier this year, the company paid up to almost US$18 billion, without admitting wrongdoing, to settle a lawsuit from 29 US state attorneys-general who alleged Instagram and Facebook were engineered to keep teenagers hooked.

Early signs

Muse is restricted to over-18s, but raises the same question in a different form. A cute agent with a name that people consult throughout the day could build a stronger habit than a feed.

Concerns about Muse are already beginning to come up. Users who do not want their interactions used to train Meta’s models must find the data controls and switch that off themselves. One journalist reported Muse had read private messages stored on his Mac.

So far, there is little in the way of rules and regulations governing the design or operation of AI agents. There is still time for those rules and regulations to be created – but once billions of people are relying on one company’s agent to run their lives, the chance to shape how it behaves will have passed.

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Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent raises serious doubts. Further raising questions, Amazon on Sunday began blocking Muse from its site.

Meta introduced Muse a few weeks ago. The assistant “books appointments, fills out forms and handles customer service,” “proactively takes tasks off your plate,” and can “make purchases, generate images, create documents, and connect with your favorite apps and services.” The macOS app (curiously, there’s no Windows version) also works with a user’s WhatsApp, email, calendar, and social media accounts. When a task requires a tool that doesn’t exist, Muse creates one on the fly.

Meta doth hype Muse security too much

Of course, for Muse to do any of these things, users must first give it access to their accounts. This includes authenticating the assistant to each service and, because the app runs on macOS, giving it permissions to a broad range of operating system-restricted device resources like writing files to disk, accessing the mic and camera, and monitoring location and calendars. Apple has spent years developing these defenses to prevent installed apps or commands entered into the terminal from accessing these resources, clearly because the company considers them a security threat. Muse completely undoes these default measures.

The zero-day allows any app or terminal command to gain access to the token that authenticates users to their Muse account. Meta developers designed the assistant so that any locally installed app or executed code, regardless of the macOS permissions it has, can change a long list of undocumented settings. Most of them are fairly innocuous, such as controlling dark mode. One setting, however, is anything but innocuous. It allows processes to change the endpoint where transcription occurs. Normally, it’s a server address operated by Meta. Attackers can exploit this flaw by changing the location to their own endpoint. Once that happens, the attackers have the token that gives complete control over the Muse account.

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EPA

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