Key points
- Meta (META) on one of its best stretches in years
- Meta's AI chief touts Muse's early adoption
- Shopify is building a Shop Pay link to Muse
Meta Platforms (META) rose about 11% to roughly $737 by early afternoon Monday in New York, putting the stock on track for its best month in more than two years. The shares have climbed since Meta launched its Muse AI agent on September 8, although the move cannot be attributed to Muse alone.
Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said Muse is ahead of OpenAI's ChatGPT on early app downloads and daily users. He posted the comparison on X on Sunday.
The numbers Meta is citing
Wang said Muse reached 2.8 million downloads across iOS and Android in its first 12 days. Using what he described as a more comparable measure, US and Canada iOS downloads, he put Muse at 1.8 million downloads and ChatGPT at 1.3 million over the same point in each app's launch.
Wang also said Muse recorded 264,000 US daily downloads on September 19, its third straight day above 200,000. He said the ChatGPT app did not pass 200,000 US daily downloads until about a year after its mobile launch.
| Wang's figure | Muse | ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|
| Days to reach about 450,000 US daily active users | 10 | 49 |
| US mobile daily active users at day 12 | 642,000 | 231,000 |
Wang said Muse had 359,000 daily active users even when the count was limited to US iOS. The figures come from Meta, not an independent app-data provider. They compare Muse's 2026 mobile launch with ChatGPT's iOS launch in May 2023, when the AI-app market was much smaller.
What Muse is
Muse is a personal AI agent that Meta launched on September 8. It is built to carry out tasks rather than only answer questions, including online shopping, buying movie tickets and scheduling appointments, Meta said. The company added a Mac app on September 18 that can take actions on a user's computer.
Meta sells Muse on three tiers: a free level, a $20-a-month Power plan and a $100-a-month Maximum plan. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said the free tier covers up to 100 million tokens a week per user. Meta has also published benchmark results for the model behind Muse.
Shopify is building a Shop Pay link to Muse
Shopify (SHOP) chief executive Tobi Lütke said Monday that the company is "partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores." His post does not give a launch date or explain which stores qualify.
See Tobi Lütke's post on X
Meta's September 8 launch announcement said Shop Pay was "coming soon." Shopify's documentation says direct checkout in AI channels is active where supported. The two companies have not publicly described the timing or eligibility rules for Shop Pay inside Muse.
Meta's own launch post describes Stripe's Link as the available payment route and says Shop Pay is coming later.
What investors are watching
Goldman Sachs has treated Muse as a possible new source of revenue and called the agent a major AI catalyst for Meta, TheStreet reported. Meta holds its Connect event on September 23. The company has not said whether Muse will feature in the program.
Wang, writing on X, said the most rewarding part of the launch was "seeing it make a difference for people who aren't in tech."
