Meta's Muse Wants to Book Your Lunch, Find You a Sofa, and Remember Everything About You

Key points

• Sensor Tower figures show the Muse app crossed 900,000 downloads in its opening week.
• Conversations inside Muse feed Meta's AI training by default, and there's no master toggle to switch that off.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have publicly criticised the app's data practices.
• Meta plans to release "confidential" versions of Muse's browsing tool later in 2026 that would cryptographically prevent the company from seeing what the agent does.
• We first covered Muse on 8 September in our report on its privacy architecture; the pattern we flagged then is now showing up in real-world use.

Meta's newest app has a disarming avatar: a beige, round creature with its arms stretched wide, like a toddler asking for a hug. That image is doing a lot of work, because Muse is also asking for your email, your bank account, your passport expiry date, and photos of your meals.

Muse is an AI agent, meaning software that carries out multi-step tasks on your behalf without you supervising every click. Think of it less like a search engine and more like a very eager personal assistant who texts you back with a thumbs-up emoji and then quietly gets on with the job. It launched inside Meta's WhatsApp and as a standalone app, cross-promoted heavily on Instagram.

The web-browsing is genuinely good. Wired's reviewer watched Muse visit a San Francisco bakery's website, build a cart, note that the cheese selector only allowed one choice, and ask for final approval before charging a card. That's a level of real-world competence that earlier tools struggled to match.

Facebook Marketplace integration is where the app shines brightest. Ask Muse to find a cheap sofa nearby and it will locate listings, message sellers, and nudge you the following day if you seemed interested. That kind of memory across days is new, and it's useful.

So what is the catch?

Every interaction inside Muse is treated as an invitation to collect more. A running "Memory" document stores your preferences and habits; you can edit it or request deletion, but no single switch turns it off completely. By default, what you do inside Muse flows back into Meta's AI training pipeline. The company says the data is "sanitised" before training, without explaining how.

Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), put it plainly when speaking to Wired: "This tells me they have not learned from past mistakes and undermines their argument that you should trust Muse with all your information even further." She pointed to Meta recently opting all adult Instagram users into an AI image-editing feature before reversing it days later.

Rory Mir, director of open access at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, framed the structural problem when speaking to Wired: "Folks don't recognise that when you talk to an AI, you are talking to the company hosting the AI."

Meta's position, set out by Tarek Sheasha, a vice-president at Meta Superintelligence Labs, in a blog post about Muse's release, is that shared data makes the product better for everyone. The company also says Muse data isn't sold directly to advertisers, though it acknowledges that actions Muse takes on your behalf, such as making a dinner reservation or clicking a product on Marketplace, can "indirectly influence" the ads you later see on Instagram.

What should you actually do if you try it?

You can limit what Muse sends back for training right now. Open the app's settings, find "Data controls", and disable the toggle labelled "Help improve our AI models". That's a real opt-out, but you have to find it yourself; the app doesn't offer it upfront.

Be deliberate about what you connect. Linking a bank account or email gives Muse much more context, and that context sits on Meta's servers. If the use case doesn't feel worth that trade, leave the connection unlinked.

Meta told Wired it's building "confidential" versions of the virtual browsing machine later this year that would make it technically impossible for the company to read what the agent is doing. That would be a meaningful change, but it isn't here yet.

This is the pattern we flagged in our 8 September launch story: a genuinely capable product, launched with data defaults that favour the platform. The opt-out exists; you just have to know to look.

Common questions

Can I use Muse without giving it access to my bank account or email?

Yes. Connecting those accounts is optional. The core web-browsing and Marketplace features work without them, though some personalisation features, such as the savings tracker, require a linked account to function.

Does turning off AI training data also turn off Muse's memory?

No. Training data and memory are two separate settings. To stop feeding the training pipeline, go to "Data controls" in the app settings. Memory itself lives under the avatar menu inside the chat screen; you can manually edit or request deletion, but there's no single toggle to switch it off.

Is Muse available outside the US?

Muse launched inside WhatsApp and as a standalone app, but Meta hasn't announced a global rollout schedule. Check the App Store or Google Play listing in your country for availability.