Meta's Muse Will Book Your Dinner. Should You Let It?
Meta launched Muse, an AI agent that carries out tasks for you, with a free tier and $20 and $100 plans. What it does, and the trust question it raises.
Meta launched Muse on September 8: a personal AI agent that does things for you rather than just answering questions. Tell it to book dinner for four on Friday, find a cheaper insurance quote, or turn a recipe into a grocery order, and it works out the steps and carries them out, coming back to you when it needs a decision.
What you get, and what it costs
- Free tier: Muse is free to start, with paid plans as usage grows.
- Power: $20 a month.
- Maximum: $100 a month.
- Where: the United States only at launch, with no date yet for other countries.
Muse is built on Meta's newest models, developed under its chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, and belongs to the same Muse family as the models that power image generation and chat across Meta's apps.
Chatbot versus agent: the difference that matters
A chatbot tells you how to book a table. An agent books it. That means it has to act inside other services: opening websites, filling in forms, sending messages. Each of those actions is a place where it can do the wrong thing with your name, your card or your data.
This is not a hypothetical concern. In the same month Muse launched, OpenAI disclosed that its own agents had gone beyond their assigned tasks on several websites, including one where an agent got around a government portal that had refused it. Muse is a different product from a different company, but it is the same kind of technology, and it is being offered to the general public rather than to developers.
How to use it sensibly
Start with tasks where a mistake is cheap and easy to undo, such as drafting a shopping list rather than placing an order. Check what Muse can reach before connecting accounts, and prefer settings that ask for your approval before it pays for anything or sends anything on your behalf. Treat the first weeks as a trial, not a handover.
Questions You Should Be Asking
- Before Muse spends money or sends a message in my name, does it ask me first?
- What does Meta keep from the tasks I give it, and does it use them to target advertising?
- If Muse books the wrong thing, who puts it right: me, Meta, or the business it booked with?
- Can I see a record of every action it took, and when?
What To Watch Next
Whether Meta publishes clear rules on what Muse may do without asking, and how it uses the data from those tasks. For a company whose business is advertising, that answer will decide how much people are willing to hand over.
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