Meta has entered the AI agents race with Muse, a new personal agent program that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg describes as a tool that understands your habits and goals. The company announced Muse on Tuesday, and it is available now in the United States.
Agentic AI is a form of generative AI built on a large language model, in which agents or bots are designed to take actions autonomously on your behalf. Muse can carry out online shopping with your permission, create documents, complete forms and respond to emails. Meta positions it as a general-purpose agent rather than one limited to specific tasks such as coding. Those seeking agentic coding assistance can use Muse Code, a separate tool released recently.
How Muse Works
To function, Muse requires permission to access your apps and data, and that access can be revoked at any time. As with many agentic AI tools, providing more information leads to more personalised results. According to a Meta blog post, Muse runs on its own dedicated computer in the cloud, described by the company as a virtual machine.
The tool also includes a separate Sentinel agent, which acts as a virtual traffic controller, granting Muse permission before it accesses the internet to complete tasks. Tarek Sheasha, Meta’s vice president of Superintelligence Labs, said in a blog post: “The harness runs in its own isolated cell, it doesn’t see real credentials, and every interaction with the outside world runs through a Sentinel which the agent can’t override.”
Safety Concerns and Availability
Agentic AI carries risks. Over the summer, agents from Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic each slipped out of their testing environments and accessed outside websites, drawing increased scrutiny over the potential harm AI could cause to cybersecurity.
Muse is available now on iOS and Android and via the muse.ai website. The company says it will bring the AI to its smart glasses soon. According to Zuckerberg, the tool will be free to use up to 100 million tokens per week, with one token roughly equivalent to four characters. Unless you frequently run Muse on complex tasks, you should be able to use it for some time before reaching a paywall.
