- Meta’s new Muse AI personal agent is garnering excitement and shows signs of becoming a hit, but Amazon has blocked the app from its site.
- The early success of Muse, which rocketed to the top of Apple’s App store, helped Meta build momentum ahead of Meta Connect, its annual developer conference.
- While the release has been a boon for Meta’s stock, it’s had the opposite effect on some financial services and online travel companies as investors see AI agents moving into more industries.
Meta’s rollout of its Muse AI personal agent has been a big hit with consumers and investors. The stock has jumped more than 20% in the two weeks since its introduction, and the app has shot up to the top of Apple’s App Store, eclipsing ChatGPT.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage late Wednesday afternoon at the company’s annual Connect conference for developers to relish in the excitement. He described the Muse AI agent as the “centerpiece” of his company’s efforts to make the technology more easily available to the broader public and not just coders.
“In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives,” Zuckerberg said.
But there are reasons for skepticism regarding Meta’s latest effort to find a real and lasting niche in the consumer artificial intelligence market.
Meta is touting Muse’s ability to book appointments and travel, fill out electronic forms for users, and monitor home security cameras. It can also shop on a user’s behalf, searching for a specific product across various sites and marketplaces and linking to Shopify or Stripe for payment.
Amazon has said that’s a no-go, blocking Muse from purchasing products on the e-commerce app, claiming that it would violate the company’s terms of service. Whether it’s other retailers taking similar steps out of concern that they’re at risk of losing the direct relationship with customers, or it’s consumers that don’t trust the Facebook parent with sensitive data, experts say the social media giant has a long way to go to turn its early momentum in Muse into a winning product.
“People are going to be very wary,” said Joseph Turow, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on digital media and privacy. “Some people are going to dip their toes into it, and some people are going to accept it for particular companies that they trust.”
Turow said there will be “early adopters,” and then others will get “seduced into this,” seeing that using this sort of personal agent can save them money by finding the best discounts.
Zuckerberg is pushing deeper into the agentic AI market at a fraught moment for the the AI industry and for Meta. Anthropic and OpenAI are calling for a slowdown in the pace of model development as fears intensify that advanced AI is spinning out of human control and, unless it gets reined in, could threaten humanity or at least amplify cybersecurity attacks.
Meta, meanwhile, agreed last month to pay up to $17 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a host of states that alleged the company misrepresented the extent of child mental health harms caused by apps like Facebook and Instagram. The emergence of generative AI and chatbots has made the issue of online addiction even more pressing, as both OpenAI and Google have been sued by plaintiffs alleging their technology caused harm, including suicides.
‘Fiercely guarding the customer relationship’
Amazon has made clear in the recent past that it won’t let AI services stand between the company and its customers. It sued Perplexity in November, alleging the startup took steps to “conceal” its AI agents so they could continue to scrape the retailer’s website without its approval. Amazon has also blocked agentic tools from OpenAI and Google.
Amazon’s “whole model is fiercely guarding the customer relationship,” said Matthew Hassett, CEO of smart alarm clock company Loftie, which sells on Amazon, and of AI-focused ecommerce startup Deliberate. “‘Respect service provider decisions’ is the polite version of ‘not on our shelf.'”
Hassett was quoting Amazon, which said in a statement that “third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.”
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/23/metas-standoff-with-amazon-over-muse-comes-ahead-of-meta-connect.html?shem=aimgspc,
