Meta's New 'Personal AI Agent' Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon

Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night.

Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower... [Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi... It's also ahead of rival AI apps like Anthropic's Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok AI, in addition to the Facebook-parent's own Meta AI app... Meta pitched the app as a way for consumers to manage and direct supercharged digital assistants that can perform a number of tasks across the web, like filling out electronic forms and organizing email inboxes... "I think up to this point most of the agentic use cases have not really been for normal people," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC in a "Squawk on the Street" interview on Monday. "Now you've got Meta's Muse and other agents out there that are starting to maybe get more potential for more broad-based adoption." The buzz around Meta was also reflected in the stock, which surged more than 11% on Monday.
Amazon is already blocking Muse, reports GeekWire. Amazon first tried to get Meta to voluntarily exclude Amazon, but they were unsuccessful: The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says could create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the popup, "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed..."

Amazon has spent the past year trying to keep outside agents off its site, suing Perplexity over its Comet browser and moving to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. [Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March, the article poitns out, "then lost it on Aug. 4, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that the user — not the AI company — was the one accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law. The court denied Amazon's petition for rehearing on Sept. 10."]

On Sunday night, Amazon said it is in direct conversation with Meta about the issue. Asked whether it would consider taking legal action, the company declined to comment. The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
Muse also appears to scrape account data, reports CNBC. But Shopify, however, "is working with Meta on Muse access. Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke announced Monday that the e-commerce site was partnering with Muse to allow agentic checkout in its online stores."

Weird how a new thing...

[Rendus]

...Gets more downloads than the thing(s) people already had downloaded. I wonder why that would be. How could a brand new app have more downloads in a short timeframe than an app that has been out for years?

The secrets of the universe are so confusing..,

Re: Weird how a new thing...

[AdmirableDesktop]

Seriously, how is this news? BREAKING: New ikea chairs are outselling chairs made five years ago

Re: Weird how a new thing...

[Type44Q]

In this economy, that would be news

Re:

[ucho]

You don't have to be so subtle, everything is botted to oblivion. In recent suply-chain attack, a fake version of mathjs on got 6 million downloads in 2 days - without any real package that depended on it. And as soon as ad networks allowed to pay for number of installs people started to work on gaming those numbers.

Ironic

[data_dreamer]

how now its Amazon putting up a fuss about external apps hammering it. When I was back in the trenches, running a site on a dedicated server was a nonstop battle against constant bots originating from AWS.

Re:

[taustin]

I assure you, that is still the case. Just a few days ago, I had to block a dozen or more /16s from AWS. (And at one time, I blocked the entirety of China for several months, but they seem to have learned to obey the robots.txt.)

Re:

[data_dreamer]

OMG yes. China, Brazil, Russia, anywhere in Africa, so many iptables /16 blocks DROPped.

Re:Ironic

[Rei]

Browsing sites like Amazon and Ebay is a chore anyway when you're looking for something specific or have a complex weighing of parameters. An AI agent for narrowing down product listings would be a big deal. But these sites neither make their own *nor*, apparently, let you use external ones.

Re:Ironic

[pla]

Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.

Amazon's search is defective by design. If you could actually jump right to the product you want, you'd never scroll through page after page of sponsored garbage Chinese knock-offs again. Can't have that, now can we?

Basic site search was solved decades ago. The fact Amazon's is such hot trash cannot possibly be accidental.

And now they have Alexa - Which is admittedly an improvement over their last on-site AI that actively refused to answer questions about or even search for product listings. Alexa is at least happy to send you to today's semi-relevant sponsored products.

Re:

[DarkOx]

At least the retail arm of Amazon is um a wait for it a retailing operation. The individual candy bars, and $2 for 20z chilled sodas are up by the checkout line where you are standing around waiting at the grocery for a reason.

At any large retailer (an some small ones) quite a lot of thought goes into what is on the end caps and what gets less prime real-estate. I actually don't think it is unreasonable Amazon should seek to control the shopping experience to a degree even if to the point of using so call

Re:Ironic

[pla]

I'm not saying this as anti-Amazon or pro-AI (and certainly not pro-Meta!), but the key difference here is people are choosing to send proxy shoppers because they can't stand how crappy the store itself is. The closest analogous physical situation would be Walmart refusing to let your aunt pick up some half&half for you.

That said, I'm not really sure why Amazon wants to die on this hill considering it's already been decided by the 9th circuit in Amazon v. Perplexity 2026 [justia.com]. An agent acting on behalf of its user cannot be considered "unauthorized" access under CFAA or CDAFA as long as the user themself had a right to the same content accessed.

Amazon might be able to spin this into a TOS issue, but that has its own risks - Anyone TOSsed from a platform clearly won't be buying anything from it, "sponsored" or otherwise. And dissecting that a bit further, the entire question only exists today because we're currently in a grey area between viewing agents as an external resource vs just another tool built into the browser (the latter was the heart of the Perplexity case). Assuming people eventually come to love the bomb, telling our browser to go buy something on Amazon will become technologically indistinguishable from doing it ourselves.

Re:

[DarkOx]

Personal shoppers etc are a thing; but what is different here is the scale.

If Amazon's experience is so bad, that is what that is maybe the market will move to walmart.com; not really the point.

The point is that letting the AI Boys become an intermediary between every enterprise and most people will NOT be a good thing. I am not saying Amazon isnt a bad actor or isnt hypocritical here on a broader context. I am saying that shop keeps of all stripes should be at least free to post a "No Robots Allowed Sign"

Re:

[jezwel]

The point is that letting the AI Boys become an intermediary between every enterprise and most people will NOT be a good thing. I am not saying Amazon isn't a bad actor or isn't hypocritical here on a broader context. I am saying that shop keeps of all stripes should be at least free to post a "No Robots Allowed Sign" and have it respected.

My problem here is personified in Facebook itself - there are so many sponsored posts and suggested Follows that it's a struggle to see what my friends have posted. You can be sure that an AI agent that created your own feed based purely on what you want to see would be instantly blocked by Facebook as well, even though that's precisely how Facebook picked up so many users in the first place.

Imagine going somewhere to catchup with some friends, only to find out that you have to watch a 5 sec ad for every s

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

It wouldn't be if EBay and Amazon provided Boolean search that actually worked. (Like many websites used to even 10 years ago.)

Re:

[anoncoward69]

They wont provide boolean search because they want to shove shit in front of your eyeballs that you might be interested in based on your current and previous searches.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

That's great, except if you're looking for a part for a specific car, specific year, trim level, engine, throwing other stuff in front of the user won't make them buy those things - it will just annoy them with useless spam.

Re:

[Slashvertisment]

Absolutely, anyone running significant web services can tell you that the past few years has been, and still is, dominated by distributed botnets of bandwidth saturating, misidentifying, robots.txt ignoring insatiable agents eager to slurp as much data as possible to feed the bottomless AI maw. There's more than a little schaudenfreude that Amazon of all companies should be complaining of this. They can go fornicate themselves.

Probably more worried about returns

[drnb]

how now its Amazon putting up a fuss about external apps hammering it.

I'd wager Amazon is more worried about all the "AI Agent" purchases that will quickly become returns.

So better autofill and better email tabs?

[locater16]

Well no of course not, I bet it's some crap that stretches its goals way beyond its competency and then people are going to be wondering why their doctor's appointments aren't for what they asked for and their taxes aren't paid. But better and generic autofill and better email tab sorting does sound like something I'd actually want, can a competent coder with the time get on those things?

Muse TV ad

[dsgrntlxmply]

Muse has an ad on streaming TV now. The production values and creepiness seem to be inspired by the Miele kitchen equipment "I like German screws" ad. The ad was very effective: at reinforcing my impression of Meta.

Re:

[coofercat]

Did they mention the zero day? https://arstechnica.com/securi... [arstechnica.com]

Using Muse to run your life is a dangerous thing to do. Sort of by design, you tell it "buy me some AA batteries", and it goes off and does it for you - To do that requires your credit card info, yadda yadda. You end up giving it all sorts of personal information Zuck definitely should not, ever, ever have. Oh, and then the zero day means it all gets exfiltrated to goodness knows where.

"Built for security from the ground up" my butt. More like

How to monetize AI

[commodore73]

Since people in general will not pay for AI, and its use doesn't seem to financially benefit most organizations (at least at current prices and capabilities), the monetization options so far appear to be coding/hacking, ads, user data collection, and tracking? Likely selling collected data to governments, marketing, and other leaches? Will that be enough to recover the data center investments?

Re:

[gweihir]

Will that be enough to recover the data center investments?

I don't think so, there are a few zeros missing. But when Anthropic and OpenAI (and some others) go bankrupt, expect all your data and chats to end up on the market.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

Someone needs to mod this up. Wasn't it google that just bought some bankrupt companies chats, voice recordings, ... for peanuts. In bankruptcy court, there just doesn't seem to be any restriction on privacy rape.

Re:

[gweihir]

I am not sure what Google bought, but sales of this type seem to be getting very common. And none of the promises as to usage limits will stay intact. Not that the promises had any real value before.

Re:How to monetize AI

[Rei]

Coding, primarily. That's the majority of the text-generation token burn, and strong majority of paying users. Free users asking questions about their daily lives make up a lot of people but only quite small amounts of tokens per user per day, and generally on tiny models. Some users like mathematicians may burn through a lot of tokens on their work, but there's just not enough of them to matter in the overall picture.

Margins at Anthropic and OpenAI are an impressive 40% (and also sustainable at the open model providers), so this isn't just going away. Most of the costs are on scaleup and the infinite race to develop the latest, greatest frontier models.

Re:How to monetize AI

[martin-boundary]

Posting a profit on AOI is very different from posting a profit on net income, otherwise known as the "bottom line," under which Anthropic remains billions of dollars in the red. [futurism.com]

Re:

[Rei]

Let me repeat:

Most of the costs are on scaleup and the infinite race to develop the latest, greatest frontier models.

It's is almost never the case that a company posts a net profit when it's in its growth phase, let alone a virtually-unheard-of 3 1/2 year 10x annualized growth streak. Many can't even manage positive margins. That Anthropic is roughly net-breakeven net income on huge margins, despite growing that quickly and operating in a cutthroat-competitive environment is no small miracle, and essenti

Re:

[Slashvertisment]

There's one tiny fly in the ointment. Where is all the money coming from for the required revenue just to break even? If OpenAI eliminated all of its competition, was literally the only AI game in town, sucked up all the other customers, then it'd need 80% of those users to be spending $2000 just to break even by 2030. As it stands, they're hard pressed to get 10% of their users to spend $20. It's insanity. Vast expenditure for an impossible imaginary market that doesn't exist.

Re:

[Rei]

The same place it's coming from now: subscriptions / API fees. Today, mostly programmers.

then it'd need 80% of those users to be spending $2000 just to break even by 2030

So your model is that their demand suddenly stop growing at 10x per year and switch to ~0x (despite no sign of that), yet they kept building out as if their demand was growing at 10x per year? That's an... unusual hypothesis there.

Re: How to monetize AI

[drinkypoo]

There's no end to the scale up phase. They will always be training. They will always need more hardware in order to outcompete their rivals. So you've confirmed that they will never be profitable. Thanks.

Re:

[Rei]

There's no end to the scale up phase.

So demand is going to keep growing at 10x/year... forever? So Anthropic itself is a paperclip maximizer? That eventually the universe itself will be entirely comprised of Anthropic.

Man... until they harvest my atoms to build their latest zettafab, I want to be invested in THAT!

Re:

[stabiesoft]

From what I've read it seems the AI co's are under-reporting cap ex numbers by stretching depreciation schedules. If that 3 year old GPU is worth zilch and you've binned it, but your depreciation schedule has it at 7, it will still be an expense from years 4-7 when there is zero value coming from it. Those finance guys have always been just as creative as AI.

Re:

[burtosis]

Will that be enough to recover the data center investments?

You mean in the next 3 years. The half life of server hardware including gpu and storage means that in about 4 years (historically) you can purchase the same performance for half the cost. Right now, less than 30% of all purchased hardware is installed, the majority is sitting warehoused somewhere just losing value by the day. The “we can’t get the electrical service to run it” is just an admission they have fomo so bad they are willing to risk the bottom line of the company to over pur

Re:

[commodore73]

> less than 30% of all purchased hardware is installed Wow, I hadn't heard that. Do you have a source? Personally, I never thought the data center investments would pay off.

There are a few other ways to make money on AI, such as Palantir (assuming they won't face financial liability, for example in the Iran girl's school bombing). So, basically, sell your soul to make any money with AI. There are other valid use cases for things that fall under the AI umbrella, but they don't seem to focus on profita

Well of course Amazon doesn't want "AI" helping

[locofungus]

Then people might be able to find what they want rather than what amazon wants to sell and without 50 pages of a completely identical product one after the other.

Re:

[gweihir]

I have had no trouble finding what I want on Amazon. Either it is much more enshittified in the US or there is some problem between keyboard and chair here. Yes, the website is an obnoxious insult to all ideas of ergonomics, but it still works.

Re:

[Rei]

I agree with the GP. You must be looking for much more specific, easy to search and quantify things. I rarely if ever shop there anymore (don't want to support Bezos, and their shipping to Iceland is outrageous (where available at all), even from the European Amazon stores), but like, if I wanted to buy grow lights, I would have to spend hours wading through ads one by one and building up a spreadsheet because you simply can't query on the parameters that matter. And they don't have an AI agent you can ou

Re: Well of course Amazon doesn't want "AI" helpin

[fluffernutter]

People used to have to go to several completely different stores and sift through all the aspects of every option. Now you are saying it's too hard to sit on your couch, select each option, and read them?

Re:

[Luthair]

He's saying the site is flooded with garbage from third party sellers.

Re: Well of course Amazon doesn't want "AI" helpi

[fluffernutter]

ok well then he should use brick and mortar stores, where they don't do that.

Re:

[Rei]

It's actually the inverse problem. In the past you had few options (if more than one at all!), so comparison is easy. Today you have hundreds or even thousands of options; you're overwhelmed by choice, making selection of the best fit much more work.

If I'm shopping for grow lights (to reuse the last example), first I'm going to want to rule out the wrong form factor, voltage, etc. Then I'll want to rule out anything that's not "approximately" in the right power range. Then I have to dig into what their actu

Re: Well of course Amazon doesn't want "AI" helpi

[fluffernutter]

so if you like the reduced choice then find out what the main brands are and only look at those. also the stores are still around, maybe support one. it appoints like if you are going to be that specific then maybe you need to pay extra to go to a store, because no Amazon sellers are not going to specify this. Also I'm pretty sure you are way overthinking it.

Re:

[gweihir]

You must be looking for much more specific, easy to search and quantify things.

Ah, yes? That is how I do online-shopping?

Re: Well of course Amazon doesn't want "AI" helpin

[drinkypoo]

If you want a crotch whacker 5000 you can just search for it, but if you want to look at all products of a certain class with certain characteristics, forget it. And many if not most people shop that way, because they do not have unlimited money and they are choosing from a pool of options in their budget.

Re:

[gweihir]

I do not know what I do differently, but apparently I do something differently than most people. Lets just say that I accept the Amazon webpage does not work well for most people, even if I have a different experience. I am well aware that my personal experience can be significantly different than the general one.

Re:

[stabiesoft]

I'm with you, I'm baffled how it can be hard to find stuff. From stainless steel screws I recently needed to .1% smd resistors to spline tools for screens, to specialized brass shutoff valves, to misters I just don't seem to have a problem finding sources and getting stuff. And that was just last week. And generally I avoid amazon. There have been a few things I've never found. There is some stuff that just doesn't exist. Market too small I imagine.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

For me it's that their metadata is meager. eBay has the best metadata outside of hardware vendors like McMaster-Carr.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

If only all online stores had parametric search like McMaster-Carr or even good old Newegg.

Agreed, but for that they would have to collect more metadata, or they would have to spend processing time automatically generating it (and likely getting it wrong.) This is why I use eBay for shopping over most other sites, though I may not purchase there depending on what deals are available at the time.

Re:

[gweihir]

It is. In most cases that is not a problem for me. For the few cases where it is, I have local high-quality vendors. Since they are much more expensive I do not use them often.

Re:

[gweihir]

Sometimes you find very special stuff on AliExpress. Of course their website is even worse, but you can find things even there with tolerable effort.

Re: Well of course Amazon doesn't want "AI" helpi

[drinkypoo]

Yeah but it's REALLY hard to find a lot of things because their search index doesn't include/understand numbers or punctuation. They are years behind eBay in site design.

I do most of my crap shopping there now and I get a lot of good deals but it's often frustrating.

Re:

[gweihir]

No argument from me. Also fun when you search for stuff in a specific material like POM or Copper and you get 70% search results made from other materials.

Re:

[Luthair]

If I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to deal with the returns.

Purchase complete!

[hadleyburg]

So unlike ChatGPT, Muse, being an "agent", can be given access to your bank account (for viewing?), and can apparently do shopping for you. It seems that it can be given use of your credit card.

User: I'm thinking of getting a new car.
Muse: Ok... I have sold your current car and have purchased a new one. I have also resigned from your job and applied for a new one with a better salary so that you can afford the repayments on the new car. I have also taken the liberty of sending flowers to the woman you talked to yesterday at the supermarket. She is quite wealthy. I calculate that if you can marry her within the year your financial problems will be further eased. She is already married, but I have sent suspicious letters to their address to prompt a divorce... Is there anything else you would like me to do?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

This *is* the AI we actually want :)

Re:

[Rei]

Remind me of... [xkcd.com]

Re:

[gweihir]

"Can be given"? Yes. "Should be given"? Hell, no. Will be interesting to see how long it takes for people to get attacked successfully. Or just lose a ton of money due to malfunctions. Obviously, the LLM pushers will deny all responsibility, as users clearly are "holding it wrong".

In other news, I recently got free Claude access via a program for researchers. I noted that the first thing asked was access to all my writings, notes, materials. Obviously, I declined. Stealing stuff is basically the DNA of LLM

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

User: I'm thinking of getting a new car.

Muse: Ok... I have sold your current car and have purchased a new one. I have also resigned from your job and applied for a new one with a better salary so that you can afford the repayments on the new car. I have also taken the liberty of sending flowers to the woman you talked to yesterday at the supermarket. She is quite wealthy. I calculate that if you can marry her within the year your financial problems will be further eased. She is already married, but I have sent suspicious letters to their address to prompt a divorce... Is there anything else you would like me to do?

Yeah, exactly. I definitely don't need or want an "agent" to do things in my life.

Research and organize some info, maybe. Write some code, maybe. Draft something that won't piss people off as much as something I would say off the cuff, maybe.

Buy things for me, or do personal communications for me in non-draft mode? Definitely not.

Will be interesting to see attackers use it

[gweihir]

Without the consent of the owners, of course. This strikes me as a barn-door sized security problem and nobody has any clue how to effectively secure AI agents at this time.

et tu Bezos

[argStyopa]

" The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store, the agent doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials,"

Gee it must be horrible to have an implacable sleepless faceless entity hoovering your data without asking...

Re:

[Rei]

"Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store" - and? I didn't tell Amazon I'd be accessing its store either before I started shopping there.

This isn't models going off and browsing Amazon for giggles; they're going there because their user told them to. The user would have otherwise told their web browser to; it just would have taken far more steps.

lol and also lol

[drinkypoo]

"Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed..."

When you are telling your customers "you agreed you wouldn't do that" the writing is on the wall, you are going away. Too bad it's going to take decades.

A swing and a miss...

[kackle]

Slop fighting slop. This is rich.

"The only thing we can be sure of about the future, is that it will be absolutely fantastic [slashdot.org]" - Arthur C. Clarke. He must have been focusing on the science and not the humans who would use it.

Jeff Beezos : OH NO someone is buying our $tuff !!

[Micah NC]

what an unfair burden to have traffic accessing your store and sending you money