Meta Wants Its New AI Agent Inside Your Inbox, Browser And Wallet

Teens may be able to use Meta’s new artificial intelligence agent inside its messaging app to do work for them.

Meta launched Muse, a personal artificial intelligence agent, that can search the internet, send out emails, and purchase items all on a user’s behalf on WhatsApp and its standalone app, the company announced on Tuesday. While the agent is restricted to users 18 and older, it arrived on a messaging service widely used by teens in the U.S. and across the globe.

The big tech company agreed to a roughly $17 billion settlement in Oakland, CA, on Aug. 26, pledging to add age checks and teen safeguards to Facebook and Instagram. Messaging apps, however, were explicitly excluded from the settlement.

“[Meta’s Social Media Platforms] shall mean the existing and future web and app versions of Instagram and Facebook … excluding, in each case, any and all direct messaging features linked to or included in those platforms, such as Instagram Direct or Messenger … and any other product or service of Meta or any of its Affiliates as it exists as of the Effective Date,” the settlement stated, defining the products affected in the deal.

Muse is also excluded from the settlement, as it is an AI tool created after the deal, according to the settlement.

The deal explained that excluded items included, “An internet-based product and/or service whose primary function is direct messaging, or a product, service, and/or feature whose primary function is … artificial intelligence features, chatbots, or interactions with artificial intelligence.”

“Introducing Muse, your personal AI agent from Meta that gets things done across every part of life,” Muse said in a Tuesday X post announcing the launch of its app.

Meta did not immediately provide a comment on the record to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“People need to understand that by using AI agents, they are handing over their online life to the companies behind those agents,” Rory Mir, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of open access and tech community engagement, told the DCNF. “In the way social media platforms insert themselves between us and our friends, AI agents from big tech aim to insert themselves between us and the open web.”