Meta’s latest AI offering, Muse, has surged to the top of Apple’s App Store in recent days, surpassing ChatGPT as the most popular free application. This personal assistant, which manages calendars, handles shopping, and schedules appointments, represents a significant move by Meta into the consumer AI agent market.
Autonomous Functionality and Integration
Utilizing the Muse Spark model, the application performs tasks by accessing various accounts on a user's device. This allows the agent to independently manage restaurant bookings or travel arrangements. For Meta, this success follows a period of intense competition with frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Tensions with Amazon
The app's rapid rise has met resistance from Amazon, which has prohibited the assistant from accessing its retail site. Amazon stated that such access by an unauthorized agent violates its terms of service, noting that Meta did not seek prior approval. While Meta has not commented directly on the block, the company has confirmed a partnership with Shopify to support its shopping capabilities.
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora noted on X that commerce and service platforms must now decide whether to provide APIs for these agents. For Amazon, which has its own shopping agent called Buy for Me, the tool represents a threat to its advertising revenue. Amazon has previously taken legal action against similar tools, such as Perplexity’s Comet AI, though it recently lost a ruling in that case.
Liat Ben-Zur, an executive consultant and former Microsoft VP, told Fortune that the dispute highlights a shift toward agents acting as online representatives, where the companies controlling access rules will wield significant influence.
Security and Privacy Considerations
To protect financial data, Meta employs one-time card numbers for transactions and maintains that login credentials remain private. However, the company continues to face scrutiny over its privacy record, including past legal challenges regarding how footage from its smart glasses was handled for AI training—claims that Meta has denied.
