In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse call your Muse

On its third-quarter earnings call, Meta put Muse, the personal AI agent it opened to the public last month, at the center of its future. Mark Zuckerberg described billions of people whose Muses talk to and transact with other Muses in a large-scale network, and predicted Muse will be highly profitable within a few years, eventually earning more per user than Facebook and Instagram.

The early numbers are real: more than 10 million downloads and setups in the U.S. and Canada, a quarter of early users active daily, and a quarter shopping through it at over $200 per purchase on average. Meta takes a fee on every transaction. When asked about friction with businesses, CFO Susan Li said everyone is just going to have to adapt.

We'll grant the upside first. An agent that handles errands, comparison shopping and scheduling is one of the more plausibly useful things AI could do for ordinary people, and 10 million setups in two countries in about a month is not nothing. If Muse saves people time and money, that is a real benefit.

The business model is where we get uneasy. Meta earns on transactions, Muse is expected to stay free for consumers, and businesses would carry the fees. An assistant paid per purchase has an obvious incentive to encourage purchases. Pair that with agents that never sleep and the vision starts to look less like a helpful aide and more like a 24-hour shopping machine wired into people's wallets, at a moment when the University of Michigan reports U.S. consumer sentiment at an all-time low.

The trust record so far doesn't help. In September a YouTuber said his Muse sent a stranger to his home in the middle of the night while arranging a Marketplace sale. There have been reports of agents leaking private conversation content. A Canadian bank executive told Bloomberg it would consider blocking Muse from customers' financial data. None of that is fatal for a young product, but agent-to-agent commerce at scale multiplies every one of those failure modes.

Then there is the money behind it. Meta plans to spend $135 billion to $145 billion this year, double last year, and now owes New Mexico $25 billion after a jury verdict. Zuckerberg said Muse hasn't launched globally because of compute cost and promised to 10x compute cost-efficiency next year without saying how. This is a company that needs Muse to work, which is exactly when we should be most skeptical of the pitch.

I'm watching less for the next download number and more for the guardrails: who the agent works for when it negotiates, how purchases are confirmed, and whether businesses get a real choice about joining a network Meta says they'll have to adapt to.

Meta released Muse to the general public in September with claims it was built for privacy and security from the ground up. Big Tech companies broadly are under pressure to show that heavy AI data center spending will pay off, and Meta's earnings call was a key test of that case.