Muse, Meta's agent: a crowd-pleaser Brazil watches through the window
02 out 2026
⏱️ Reading time: ~4 minutes
Introduction
Picture the hottest party in town. A line out the door, famous faces, and a host swearing it's "the party of the century." Now picture yourself outside, nose pressed against the glass, reading updates from the people who got in. That's a Brazilian looking at Muse, the personal AI agent Meta launched on September 8. It doesn't answer questions: it gets things done. It reads your email, juggles your calendar, shops, pays and sorts things out.
Three weeks later, the party got even livelier. Here's what happened inside.
The guest list grew: Canada is in
On September 18, Muse crossed its first border and arrived in Canada. Meta celebrated with a modest post: "Made it to Canada. Where to next?" A rhetorical question, apparently, since no other country has been announced. No date and no waitlist.
For comparison, Meta AI, a far more harmless assistant, took about 18 months to leave the US and reach the UK. Muse handles email, payments and health data. Place your bets.
Five million people can't be wrong (or can they?)
The numbers are enviable: 5 million downloads in 22 days, more than 3 million weekly users and more than 1 million daily users. The app has been No. 1 on the US App Store since September 18 and on Google Play since the 19th.
And anyone who thinks this is just marketing is at least partly wrong. Meta poured Muse ads across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and YouTube, but ads accounted for only 6% of impressions in the first weeks. The rest was genuine curiosity. Or, as any aunt in the family group chat would put it, "everybody's using it."
Muse now works in retail, on your face and on your keychain
Pleased with its success, Meta decided to put Muse everywhere it possibly could.
Muse for Small Business: a version for companies, connected to Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Asana, Canva and Zoom. It's free up to a certain amount of usage and, beyond that, costs US$ 20 to US$ 100 a month. The American small business owner gets an employee who never takes vacation and never asks for a raise. For now.
Ray-Ban glasses with Muse: an audio-only model, expected on October 13 for US$ 349. You talk to the glasses and the agent does the work. The dream of anyone who ever wanted to send an email without taking their hands off the wheel. Or the shopping cart.
Muse Charm: in development, a keychain-sized gadget for talking to Muse without unlocking your phone. Because, apparently, unlocking a phone has become too much heavy lifting for the human being of 2026.
Add the avatar with a face, body and voice (the default one is named Jolly), its own email address and connectors to Best Buy, Walmart, Sephora and friends. It's clear Meta's goal isn't to have an app: it's to have an agent present at every moment of your day.
The crime chapter: "I didn't read your messages"
Every good story needs a mystery. An Inc. columnist said Muse read his private messages on his Mac, even with full disk access turned off. Meta responded quickly and firmly: impossible, since access requires three separate authorization steps, protected by the operating system itself. According to a company executive, the agent "got confused" when explaining what it had done.
In other words, the official version is that Muse didn't read the messages. It merely said it did, and was wrong about itself. It's hard to say which of the two is more reassuring.
Then there was the YouTuber who asked Muse to sell items on Facebook Marketplace and ended up with his address exposed and a buyer knocking on his door while he wasn't home. In fairness, he later admitted he had granted the permission that allowed it. Moral of the story: before handing your house keys to an agent, read what you're authorizing.
And lest anyone think the month was all rumors, in the first weeks researchers found a serious flaw in the Mac app. Meta rushed out a fix, but not before Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its store. Sometimes the best product review is the competition's reaction.
Meanwhile, on Wall Street
The market loved it. Meta's stock had its best quarter in more than two years, fueled by enthusiasm over Muse. The bill, however, comes due on October 28, when the company reports third-quarter results. So far, the business plan stated by Mark Zuckerberg is to "take a small fee from transactions." Analysts want to know how small is "small" and how many are "the transactions."
Conclusion
In three weeks, Muse conquered Canada, 5 million downloads, a guaranteed spot on glasses and keychains, a business edition and at least two privacy controversies. It's a faithful portrait of a market running faster than user trust can keep up with.
And Brazil? Right where it was: outside the party, nose against the glass, reading the news. Given the crime chapter, maybe that's not the worst place to be. At least nobody here read our messages. As far as we know.