Meta lets Muse agents handle tasks and take transaction fees
At Meta Connect 2026, Zuckerberg moved his top-secret AI application, Muse, to the center of the company’s strategy. Unlike conversational chatbots like ChatGPT that merely talk, Muse is a true agent that actually gets things done: booking travel, negotiating lower insurance bills, and even making direct payments through Stripe with user permission. The free tier offers about 100 million tokens per week, while heavy users pay between $20 and $100 monthly, though Meta expects most people will stick with the free version.
Half a month after launch, Muse dominated the U.S. iPhone free app chart for two consecutive weeks, logging over 3.4 million downloads, with 642,000 daily active mobile users in the United States—a pace faster than ChatGPT’s. Major retailers and payment giants such as Walmart, Best Buy, and PayPal have already integrated it. Wall Street analysts are excited; JPMorgan raised its price target to $920, betting on the potential to take commissions from future transactions.
Naturally, handing over your email, calendar, and wallet to an ad-driven company raises trust questions. Amazon was the first to block Muse’s access to its website, citing security concerns about storing user credentials in the cloud. With this move, Meta is putting all its chips on execution rather than conversation.
To extend the point: the core contradiction in agent commercialization lies in the misalignment between intent and trust. Model-level capabilities have already been embedded into existing products by OpenAI and Google. Meta, however, has chosen to build an execution layer independent of social content, attempting to establish trust boundaries through isolated virtual machines and purchase protections. Retail integrations essentially turn Muse into an aggregated transaction gateway, and the scalability of its commission model depends on breaking free from single-platform constraints to form a cross-site agency network. Historically, this resembles Amazon’s early retail consolidation, but Meta faces stricter data privacy regulations, and its advertising DNA creates inherent tension with agency neutrality.
Original: Meta Has Figured Out How Muse Makes Money - TMTPost