Meta's Muse exposes its full filesystem — on purpose

Muse, Meta's chatbot, began offering users a compressed download of its entire filesystem yesterday, root access included. Just a day earlier it had refused, citing security. Nat Friedman from Meta later clarified this is "intended behavior": Muse's secure VM is effectively a personal Linux box in the cloud — install software, write and run code, browse the web.

What changed between yesterday and today: yesterday, after some coaxing, Muse would show a directory tree as text but wouldn't package the whole root directory. "I still can't do a full copy of /, even without the secrets." Today it delivered a zip with a "full filesystem registry," claiming "all secrets have been removed." Also added a clickable file browser with root access — a significant upgrade from yesterday's text-only view.

Different architecture from competitors: Muse's architecture differs fundamentally from ChatGPT and Gemini. It's closer to running OpenClaw on a local machine, except the machine lives in the cloud. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts said yesterday the company "continues to update the product, so users may see changes in the amount of information available on their virtual machine" — and that appears to be exactly what happened.

The unanswered contradiction: the obvious question is why Muse initially refused on security grounds if this was always the intended behavior. Two possibilities: either the model itself doesn't reliably know what it's allowed to expose — a known issue in these systems — or Meta decided to lean harder into the "computer in the cloud" concept and tweaked the settings to make the function work more reliably. Meta hasn't responded to inquiries on the matter.

A personal computer in the cloud, no filters: bottom line, Muse users now get full access to a complete runtime environment — not a limited sandbox, but a Linux machine they can run however they want. It's fun, it's useful, and it puts Muse in a unique spot against competitors who keep their environments hermetically sealed.