Meta’s new AI agent app is quickly taking over the consumer market, replacing ChatGPT as the top free app in Apple’s App Store in recent days. The app, which features a personal AI agent that books appointments, shops, and organizes calendars on people’s behalf, is the talk of the town in tech circles this week.
Called Muse, the app, which uses Meta’s latest AI model Muse Spark, connects users to a range of services that its AI agent manages autonomously. This means giving a user access to accounts over the phone in exchange for Muse booking a vacation or processing restaurant reservations on their behalf. It’s Meta’s first major consumer AI agent foray, catapulting the company past its competitors for now.
However, not everyone is rolling out the red carpet for “Meta’s Muse.” Amazon blocked Meta’s assistants from accessing its online store on the grounds that “continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Terms of Service, which our customers have agreed to.” Amazon said Meta never asked for permission to access its website. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although the company announced a partnership with the company Shopify for some of Muse’s shopping features.
“It is only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok alongside the Frontier LLM agents,” says Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networkswrote on [Application Programming Interfaces] for consumer agent interaction. Smaller players have no choice. Either the consumer benefits or the distribution aggregators will charge a higher transaction price.”
Muse’s groundbreaking success represents a much-needed victory for Meta in the AI space after the company faced a series of difficulties competing with pioneering labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Muse’s rapidly growing popularity and Amazon’s reactionary blockade show how quickly agent technology is transforming the consumer space. Meta published Muse, as did Anthropic and OpenAI released cheaper versions some of their models. Apple also recently introduced its revamped Siri as part of its latest iOS update.
The bigger questions raised by Muse’s release are who controls the shopping and user interfaces that Meta wants access to, and how large companies will agree to such access. For Amazon, Muse poses a threat because it bypasses the usual process of people visiting and viewing the website or app Advertising, which serves as an important profit driver.
“This is bigger than an argument over bot detection or website access. We are moving toward a world where agents increasingly act as our online representatives,” said Liat Ben-Zur, former CEO of management consultancy LBZ Advisory Microsoft Vice President of Consumer Services said Assets. “The companies that control access rules will have enormous influence on whether these agents actually work for the consumer.”
Amazon has taken action against other companies over similar issues. It sued last year Confusion about its Comet AI toolwhich could access Amazon accounts in a similar way to Muse. Amazon recently lost a ruling on that lawsuit after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that users ultimately chose to access Amazon through Perplexity’s bot; Amazon is still struggling with the problem.
Amazon has its own shopping agent called Buy for Me that performs similar tasks to Muse. The company has stated that brands can disable the feature, although this requires action as brands are automatically enabled. CEO Andy Jassy also said Amazon is exploring AI shopping agent partnerships with third-party companies.
Privacy is certainly a key issue for consumers weighing assistants like Muse, which, while allowing for personal details — like the ability to name your assistant — require access to sensitive information like bank accounts to truly work on a user’s behalf.
According to Meta, user logins are kept secret and online purchases use a unique card number that hides a person’s actual card details. Still, Meta has been at the center of previous privacy issues. Meta has faced several proposed class-action lawsuits related to its smart glasses, including one alleging that the company sent footage shot with the glasses, including highly personal material, to third-party human reviewers for comment and AI development. Meta has denied the allegations.
Muse’s rise comes at just the right time for Meta: CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to unveil updates to the company’s smart glasses at its annual meeting Connect event in Menlo Park, Calif., on Wednesday.