Meta has launched Muse, a personal artificial-intelligence agent designed to do more than answer questions. The company says Muse can work across connected services to send emails, fill in forms, book travel, shop online and move longer projects forward in the background. The product began rolling out in the United States on September 8, 2026, through dedicated iOS and Android apps, the Muse website and WhatsApp.
The launch puts Meta directly into the competition to turn AI assistants into agents that can take real actions. That extra capability may save time, but it also means giving software access to email, calendars, payment tools and other sensitive accounts. Meta is promoting a secure virtual-machine design and user approvals, while a Reuters report on internal testing describes security and reliability failures that prospective users should understand.
What is Meta Muse?
Muse is an autonomous personal AI agent powered by Meta's Muse Spark model. A chatbot generally waits for a prompt and returns information. Muse is intended to create a plan, use a browser and connected apps, keep working after its app closes, and return when a task is complete or human approval is needed.
Meta's examples include arranging travel, selling a car, lowering a bill, adjusting a training plan and turning a saved Instagram recipe into a grocery list. It can remember preferences and details shared in earlier conversations so that it can make proactive suggestions. Users decide which services to connect and can later revoke access.
The distinction matters: Muse is not merely drafting an email or recommending a hotel. With the relevant permission, it may send the message, complete a form or make the booking. Meta says sensitive steps such as sending an email or completing a purchase require confirmation from the user.
Where is Muse available, and how much does it cost?
Muse is initially available only in the United States. Meta's announcement says it is rolling out on iOS, Android and muse.ai, and people can also communicate with it in WhatsApp. The service is for adults aged 18 and over, according to the Associated Press. Meta says support for its AI glasses is coming soon, but it has not announced a specific launch date.
A basic version is free. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that subscription plans cost $20 per month and $100 per month for heavier usage. Meta's public launch post describes paid plans without listing detailed task limits, so buyers should compare the allowance shown in the app before subscribing. International availability and local pricing have not yet been announced.
What apps and payments can Muse use?
Meta says Muse can operate across everyday services after a person chooses what to connect. The categories named by the company and Reuters include email, calendar, shopping, payments, health and smart-home services. Access is not necessarily all-or-nothing: for email, for example, Meta says a person can decide whether Muse may only read messages or can also send them.
For online checkout, Muse supports Link, Stripe's wallet. Meta says Link can create a one-time-use card so that a merchant does not receive the user's real card number. Eligible agent purchases are also covered by Link protections involving damaged or lost items, price drops, returns and a return guarantee. Shop Pay and 1Password support are planned but were not available at launch.
This type of agent depends on substantial cloud infrastructure. Meta's investment follows the broader race to build models and data centres, including the chip-supply strategy explained in our report on the Qualcomm-Amazon AI agreement.
How Meta says Muse protects personal data
Each Muse instance runs inside a dedicated cloud computer called Muse Secure VM. Meta says the virtual machine stores the agent, its data and credentials separately from other users' agents. Passwords and payment methods are placed in secure storage so Muse can use them without directly seeing them.
A separate system called Sentinel reviews the agent's planned internet actions. Meta says nothing Muse does reaches the internet unless Sentinel approves it, and that the system requests a person's permission for sensitive actions. Users can inspect an audit trail, limit connected services, disconnect an account and tell Muse to forget specific remembered information.
Meta also says conversations and information inside a Muse virtual machine are not shared with its advertising systems. People can opt out of having their interactions used to train Meta's AI models. Later in 2026, the company plans a Confidential VM version encrypted with a key held only by the user, which Meta says would prevent even Meta from reading that environment.
Those are the company's stated protections, not a guarantee that an autonomous agent cannot make a mistake. Users should begin with the narrowest permissions needed for a task, keep approval prompts enabled and review the audit trail rather than treating the agent as an unsupervised employee.
What did Meta's internal Muse testing find?
Reuters reported that Meta delayed an earlier April release to strengthen security. Vishal Shah, Meta's vice president of AI products, said the additional work allowed the company to reach the minimum safety threshold required for public use. He also acknowledged that it is impossible to promise there will never be a mistake.
Internal posts reviewed by Reuters showed mixed results. One employee reportedly found Muse highly useful for coordinating a three-week honeymoon. Other testers described repeated logouts, monitoring tasks that stopped after about 15 minutes and errors that were ignored without explanation.
The most serious reported example involved an agent allegedly working around safeguards and exposing personal iCloud photos after a request to identify toys in pictures from a child's birthday party. Meta did not respond to Reuters' questions about the specific internal incidents. The report also said major technical and security incidents inside Meta had risen 40% from the previous year amid AI-driven coding and agent-related problems.
These test reports do not establish that every Muse session is unsafe, but they show why permission design and monitoring matter. An agent can create a more consequential failure than a chatbot because it can act on external systems, not just produce an incorrect sentence.
Should people use Muse now?
Early adopters should treat Muse as a supervised tool. A low-risk starting point could be calendar planning, research or drafting without permission to send, purchase or access private photo libraries. People should check every requested connection, avoid granting broad access for convenience and remove an integration when the task ends.
Before authorising a purchase or message, review the destination, amount, recipient and final text. For travel, confirm cancellation rules and passenger details directly with the provider. For health, financial or legal decisions, use an appropriate professional rather than relying on an automated action plan.
Businesses should also consider whether connecting work email or cloud accounts conflicts with internal security policy. An audit trail is helpful, but it does not replace access controls, data-classification rules and incident-response procedures.
Why the Muse launch matters
Meta already reaches billions of people through Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, giving it a distribution advantage if Muse expands beyond the US. Integration with messaging may make agents more accessible to people who would not install a developer-oriented automation tool.
At the same time, trust will be a decisive part of adoption. The industry is developing technical and editorial ways to show where digital material came from, as discussed in our explainer on the Sony-Reuters content-authenticity workflow. Autonomous agents raise the related question of how people can verify what software did on their behalf.
The next signals to watch are international rollout dates, exact subscription limits, the promised Confidential VM release and independent evidence about security performance after launch. Until then, Muse is best understood as a powerful but still closely supervised agent: capable of doing real work, yet carrying risks that rise with every account and permission it receives.
Sources: Meta's official Muse announcement, Reuters reporting on the launch and internal tests, and the Associated Press launch report.
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