Meta launches Muse personal AI agent amid privacy backlash and $17 billion settlement

Meta unveiled its Muse personal agent app on Tuesday, offering users a free tier or monthly subscription plans priced at $20 or $100 depending on usage. The launch comes at a particularly fraught time for the company and the broader tech and AI industry.

Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said the app runs within "its own isolated environment" inside the company's computing infrastructure and "never sees your actual passwords or payment details."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick attend the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 9, 2026. Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Product Details

Meta introduced its AI personal agent app on Tuesday and is asking a subset of users to pay at a time when the company and broader artificial intelligence industry face intensifying scrutiny and public skepticism.

The app, which was given the internal code name Hatch, is powered by the Muse Spark family of foundation models that Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang has been debuting at a breakneck pace since April.

Meta said the Muse app lets people offload digital tasks including:

• Booking appointments
• Filling out electronic forms
• Monitoring home security camera feeds

The company designed the app so "it feels very approachable and friendly and explainable, and it doesn't feel too complicated," Wang told CNBC in an interview.

"Behind the scenes, Muse might be doing very advanced coding workflows, or building sophisticated integrations, or doing quite a lot of heavy lifting while keeping that very sort of simple for the user," Wang said.

Pricing Tiers

Wang said the Muse personal agent will be available in either a free tier or through monthly subscription plans of $20 or $100, depending on usage.

Strategic Context

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who hired Wang last year as part of a $14 billion investment in his startup, Scale AI, has been dropping hints to investors that the company's next big AI bet involves supercharged digital assistants that sift through emails or look for deals on furniture.

Zuckerberg has said that supercharged digital assistants represent the next big leap for AI models, pitching them as one of the reasons that Meta is spending heavily on data centers and infrastructure. In the company's earnings call in July, Zuckerberg said "new personal agents that will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead."

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Company Challenges

Meta's launch of its personal assistant comes amid a particularly fraught time for the company. Meta recently agreed to pay nearly $17 billion in a major settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general that had sued the company for misrepresenting the prevalence of harm on apps like Facebook and Instagram. Meta still faces a wave of personal injury and school district lawsuits involving similar allegations.

Meanwhile, there are rising concerns about the potential cybersecurity risks posed by AI agents and their underlying foundation models, and the country faces a growing backlash against AI data centers and the companies that are building them.

Wall Street Pressure

But Meta is also under pressure from Wall Street to show returns on its AI investments, as the company tries to diversify its business and reduce its reliance on digital ads. The personal agent follows other newer initiatives like the Muse Code AI agent for developers and various subscription plans.