Meta's new AI agent Muse reached the No. 1 spot on Apple's U.S. App Store within about a week of launching, overtaking OpenAI's ChatGPT (now No. 2), with Google's Gemini at No. 8 and Anthropic's Claude at No. 13. Unlike a typical chatbot, Muse acts as an autonomous agent: it can send emails, book trips, fill out forms and keep working on a task after a user closes the app.
The launch has not gone smoothly everywhere. Amazon has blocked Muse from shopping on its site after Meta declined a request to voluntarily exclude Amazon from the agent's capabilities. Amazon says third-party agents that buy on a customer's behalf should operate openly and respect a retailer's choice not to participate, and it raised privacy concerns about Muse accessing and retaining customer data. Meta disputes this, saying Muse has no visibility into passwords or payment methods.
The episode highlights a fight brewing across the tech industry over autonomous AI shopping agents: retailers want visibility and control over bots acting on their platforms, while AI companies are racing to make agents that can act on a user's behalf without friction. Wall Street, meanwhile, has responded positively to Meta's push into standalone agent products, with analysts holding a largely bullish consensus on the stock.