Meta's new AI agent Muse hits No. 2 in the US

Meta just launched Muse, a dedicated consumer AI agent built to handle real-world errands on your behalf. According to new data from Sensor Tower, the iOS app climbed to No. 2 on the U.S. App Store after racking up more than 83,000 downloads since Tuesday.

While climbing to the runner-up spot looks impressive, Muse’s debut is modest by Meta’s own standards. Threads racked up 4.3 million U.S. downloads on its first day, and the standalone Meta AI app saw 108,000. Meanwhile, ChatGPT pulled in half a million U.S. installs in its first week—averaging roughly 83,300 downloads a day, a threshold Muse took twice as long to reach. Over on Google Play, Muse is currently languishing at No. 338 in the Productivity category, though downloads via the web and WhatsApp are not captured in these store estimates.

AI agents trapped inside a secure sandbox

Unlike workplace-oriented assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work or Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, Meta is pitching Muse as an agent built for everyone. Powered by its new Muse Spark model, Muse is available on iOS, Android, muse.ai, and WhatsApp, with AI glasses integration coming soon.

The pitch is that Muse actually finishes tasks instead of just spitting out text. You can give it an open-ended goal, and it will browse the web, fill out forms, and even negotiate on your behalf. It continues working in the background when the app is closed, pinging you only for critical checkpoints like making a purchase or sending an email. To handle payments, Muse integrates with Stripe’s Link using single-use virtual cards backed by purchase protections, with Shop Pay and 1Password logins slated to arrive later.

To soothe obvious privacy anxieties, Meta is isolating each user’s instance inside a dedicated cloud environment called Muse Secure VM. Credentials are kept in a separate vault that Muse can use without ever reading in plaintext, while an independent system-level agent called Sentinel must inspect and approve any action before it hits the open web. Users can opt out of model training, tell Muse to forget specific facts, and rest assured conversations won’t feed Meta’s ad machinery. A fully encrypted Confidential VM is promised for later this year.

The ghost of scandals past vs. rising rival Instinct

Muse isn't arriving in a vacuum. It faces fierce competition from Instinct, a $2.5 billion text-based AI agent startup with $350 million in funding. Silicon Valley is already obsessed with Instinct, which just rolled out user email addresses, integrations with Stripe and 1Password, and an agent-to-agent coordination feature that lets your assistant chat with a friend's assistant to plan hangouts. Industry observers note that Instinct's social graph—grounded in who you actually communicate with daily—could end up being more potent than Meta’s bloated social feeds.

Meta also has severe baggage to unpack. Muse dropped just days after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over youth harms on its platforms. Between past FTC fines and Cambridge Analytica, asking consumers to hand over their passwords, browsing habits, and credit cards to Meta is a tough pill to swallow.

Why it matters

We think Muse is one of Meta's boldest consumer bets since its metaverse pivot, shifting the agent narrative from corporate coding suites to everyday chores. For regular consumers, having an assistant manage flight bookings or turn an Instagram reel into a shopping list for free inside WhatsApp is genuinely useful, even if few will rush to hand over payment permissions on day one.

Engineering-wise, Meta’s isolated VM and Sentinel supervisor setup is exceptionally clever. Meta knows its reputation is toxic when it comes to privacy; reassuring users with legal text won’t cut it, but hard architectural sandboxing might. The real risk is whether that architecture is enough to overcome the massive trust deficit lingering from its recent $18 billion settlement. Competitors like Instinct are moving blistering fast without decades of PR baggage, which means Meta’s road to dominating consumer agency will be a much steeper climb than its past social network takeovers.