Muse agent

Meta has introduced Muse, a new AI agent aimed at small businesses. A Meta executive says the tool is designed to save business owners time and drive growth, and discussed the product with the US Chamber of Commerce. The rollout signals Meta's continued push to bring AI assistants to smaller advertisers and merchants rather than only large enterprise customers.

Zach Yadegari, the 19-year-old co-founder of the popular Cal AI calorie-tracking app, has raised $10 million for a new startup building a personal AI agent. The venture enters a competitive field, going up against existing players including Instinct, Muse and Bee. The funding and Yadegari's young age have drawn attention across tech and startup circles.

Meta is repositioning its AI efforts beyond the Llama model family, with its Muse Spark system now said to power Meta AI across its apps and Ray-Ban smart glasses. The company is also reported to be pushing toward personal superintelligence, AI agents and enterprise AI tools. The shift suggests Meta wants Meta AI to become a full ecosystem rather than a single model, though details on capabilities and rollout remain sparse.

AI shopping agents, with Muse cited as an example, are being discussed as a force changing the retail stock landscape. The claim is that software that shops on consumers' behalf could shift which retail companies win and lose value as commerce increasingly routes through AI intermediaries. Details on specific market moves or analyst positions are not provided, and the report offers no evidence beyond the headline claim.

Microsoft has announced that the Meta Muse agent will launch natively on Windows, with reports also citing new on-device AI tools from Perplexity aimed at Surface users. The announcement is being shared in technology and cybersecurity circles, where commenters are weighing what a native AI agent built directly into the operating system could mean for Windows, Microsoft's AI strategy and its growing partnership ecosystem.

A discussion among web publishers and Chrome on Linux users is asking whether Meta's Muse crawler or agent can be blocked at the server level without resorting to fingerprinting scripts that would also block legitimate Chrome on Linux visitors. Some users report being caught by bot-detection systems more often, and site owners are weighing how to distinguish AI agents from real people.

A new report by HUMAN finds Meta's Muse accounts for 72% of AI agent requests across the web. Of Muse's requests, 84% target product and search pages, and the agent is 25% more likely than other AI agents to reach checkout, raising questions about whether analytics tools can distinguish this traffic from human visitors.

The Verge is examining two AI agents said to be in development at Meta and OpenAI, reportedly codenamed Muse and Dots, and asking whether people can trust them to manage daily tasks. The discussion, framed around a Verge podcast episode, centers on privacy concerns and the race between major tech companies to build personal AI agents, including whether such free services can be trusted with sensitive personal data.