Meta's Muse Is Better at Surveilling Than Helping Me

I saw Meta’s latest app, Muse, cross-promoted on another Meta-owned platform, Instagram, and decided to download the AI assistant.

“Hand off everyday tasks like finding deals, booking reservations, and managing your inbox,” the pop-up read. “Muse keeps working while you get on with your day.” It’s free to use, and easily connects to other data sources, like my email and bank account. Muse’s default avatar is a beige-colored cross between an Ewok and a Labubu, with its arms outstretched, presumably to scoop up all my data.

Meta’s Muse is a mainstream version of AI agents already popular in Silicon Valley for automating personal tasks, like OpenClaw and Instinct. It’s a hit for the company: the Muse app has been downloaded over 900,000 times in its first week, according to Sensor Tower. The user experience is less like prompting a chatbot, and more like texting a friend with task requests—the AI agent acknowledges messages with a thumbs-up emoji and gets to work in the background. Muse is also available through Meta’s WhatsApp platform.

But after a few days with Muse, I’m convinced this AI tool is more obsessed with collecting data about me than actually getting stuff done.

“Muse is the first personal AI agent built for everyone, with built-in protections and user controls that put people absolutely in charge of how they use it—any suggestion we didn’t build with that in mind from the beginning is ludicrous,” Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez tells WIRED.

Good Clicks

Muse’s ability to surf the web is genuinely impressive. When you ask it to complete a task, Muse uses a “virtual machine” to browse the internet on your behalf, running searches and clicking around on different web pages. When I tested similar tools last year, like the now-defunct ChatGPT Agent, the AI’s clicks were erratic and error-filled. Muse rarely seems to get lost while browsing.