Key points
- Meta releases Muse, a personal AI agent, in the US
- Runs in its own virtual machine with a Sentinel gatekeeper
- Free tier, then $20 or $100 a month
- Top tier is about half the $199.99 Meta reportedly considered
Meta (META) launched Muse on Tuesday, a personal AI agent designed to book travel, make purchases and fill out forms on a user's behalf. It offers a free tier and subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month. Muse is available on iOS, Android, the web at muse.ai and in WhatsApp, with access limited to US adults aged 18 and over, the Associated Press reported.
Meta shares slipped 0.6% to $613.31 on Tuesday, according to Robinhood market data.
How Muse works
In its announcement, Meta pitches Muse as a private agent that works toward a user's goals and suggests ideas on its own. A user gives it a goal, and the agent plans the steps and works through them, opening a browser, filling out forms and messaging on the user's behalf. Talking to it works like messaging a person, in the Muse app or directly in WhatsApp, the announcement says.
The security design is the part Meta leads with. The agent lives in what the company calls a Muse Secure VM, a dedicated virtual machine that holds both the agent and the user's data. "A separate Sentinel agent runs on that same machine, kept apart from Muse at the system level. Nothing Muse does reaches the internet unless the Sentinel approves it," the announcement says. Sensitive actions such as payments and emails go to the user for approval. Meta says Muse has no visibility into passwords or payment methods and doesn't share conversations or the data in the VM with its ad systems.
The model underneath is Muse Spark, the family Meta updated to version 1.3 last week, and TechCrunch reported that the agent runs on that version. Meta said Muse is coming to its AI glasses soon, without a date.
What it costs, and what was expected
TechCrunch reported the two paid tiers as Power at $20 a month and Maximum at $100 a month. Meta's own post says only that Muse is "free for most of what people need, with subscription plans for people who want to do more." Maximum costs about half the $199.99 premium price Meta reportedly considered in August, when the agent was code-named Hatch. The Information had also reported an early September launch inside Instagram and WhatsApp, and the date held. Tuesday's announcement did not list Instagram as a place to access Muse, and the $199.99 tier didn't appear.
Neither Meta's post nor TechCrunch's report says what usage limits separate the free tier from the two paid ones. Meta also gave no user numbers and no date for markets outside the United States. The announcement went out at 12 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday.
Meta is buying the next piece rather than building it. It reportedly agreed to acquire Swedish AI startup Stilla to speed up its Business Agent.
By late September, the Muse launch had Meta's stock on track for its best month in more than two years.
Weeks later, a Hunterbrook report tied AI data provider Innodata to Muse, sending its shares up 14.6%.
Reuters later reported that Meta had tested human call-center workers on some Muse phone calls with its own employees.
One early use case is finding and canceling subscriptions people forgot about, which Stanford research suggests is worth a lot to the companies selling them.
Meta now plans to sell Muse to companies too, through a new unit called Meta Enterprise Platform. Meta launched the unit on September 28 and hired MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to lead it. By Sept. 30, Muse had passed 5 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Meta also launched Meta One subscriptions on Sept. 15, and its top business tier costs $499 a month and lifts Facebook's cap on link posts.
Update, Oct. 8: Manus, the AI agent startup China forced Meta to give up, has raised more than $500 million.
