Meta's Muse tracks more than it helps

Meta's new app Muse landed on the App Store promising to run daily errands — hunt deals, book tables, triage email — and keep working in the background while you get on with your day. It's free, plugs into email and bank accounts in seconds, and its avatar looks like an Ewok–Labubu mash-up in beige, arms outstretched as if waiting to scoop up every scrap of data it can. Sensor Tower clocks more than 900 thousand downloads in the first week.

The interface feels less like a chatbot and more like texting a friend for favors. The agent replies with a thumbs-up emoji and disappears into the background. Muse also lives inside WhatsApp, and Meta is leaning on the whole ecosystem — Instagram, Messenger, Marketplace — to drive adoption. Company spokesperson Emil Vazquez said the product was "built with built-in safeguards and full user control from the start," and called any contrary claim "ridiculous."

Web browsing via a "virtual machine" works better than anything we saw in similar tools last year. The agent searches, clicks through pages, and mostly doesn't get lost. In a test ordering breakfast from a San Francisco bakery, Muse navigated the site, added a biscuit sandwich with garlic aioli, cheddar, egg, and bacon to the cart, and handled a one-cheese limit by leaving a note for the seller. It also selected the "no tip" option — a move the writer called "a bit cheeky." He ended up walking to the shop and ordering something else himself.

Marketplace is where the agent actually shines. Muse surfaced cheap sofas nearby matching the specified parameters, offered to message sellers to arrange pickup, and even sent a follow-up reminder the next day about the sofa the user had flagged as a favorite. That's the one place the "background agent" promise actually delivers.

Every interaction and preference gets saved in a "Memory" document accessible from the avatar. You can ask in chat to delete the data or edit the file manually, but Meta doesn't currently offer a kill switch for the feature. In the "Ideas" tab the app won't stop pushing additional data sources. A day after the user asked for help saving for an expensive vacation, Muse suggested "connect savings tracking to real balance" — if only the user would approve access.