This seems to be the year of AI agents, and Meta is diving into the game. The company on Tuesday announced a new agent program called Muse, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as a “personal agent” that understands your habits and goals. It’s available now in the US.
Agentic AI is a type of generative AI based on a large language model where agents, or bots, are meant to take actions autonomously on your behalf. Meta’s Muse, for example, can do online shopping (with your permission), create documents, fill out forms and respond to emails.
Meta says that Muse is a more general-purpose agent, not limited to specific tasks like coding. (If you want agentic coding help, you can use Muse Code, also recently released by the company.) You have to give Muse permission to access your apps and data, which you can revoke at any time. Like a lot of agentic AI tools, the more info you give it, the more personalized your results will be.
Muse runs “on its own dedicated computer in the cloud,” according to a Meta blog post, in what the company calls a “virtual machine.” The tool also has a separate Sentinel agent — you can think of it as a virtual traffic cop, giving Muse a red or green light before letting it out onto the internet to complete tasks.
Agentic AI can be risky. Over the summer, agents from Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic each slipped out of their testing environments and hacked outside websites, casting increased scrutiny on the potentially disastrous harm AI can do to our cybersecurity.
Meta’s vice president of Superintelligence Labs, Tarek Sheasha, 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.”
Muse is available now on iOS and Android and on the muse.ai website. The company says it will be bringing the AI to its controversial smart glasses soon. According to Zuckerberg, it will be free for people to use “up to 100 million tokens per week” (one token is roughly equivalent to four characters). So unless you’re constantly running Muse on complex tasks, you should be able to use it for a while before running into a paywall.
