Meta’s Muse AI app has surged to the top of Apple’s App Store, unseating ChatGPT as the No. 1 free app in recent days.
The app is built around a personal AI agent that books appointments, shops, and organizes calendars on behalf of users. Meta says the service uses its Muse Spark AI model and connects to a range of services that the agent can handle autonomously.
That access comes with a tradeoff: users hand over logins and other account access so Muse can book a vacation or make restaurant reservations for them. Meta says user logins are kept secret and that online purchases use a one-time card number that hides a person’s actual card details.
Amazon has already pushed back. The company blocked Meta’s assistant from accessing its online store, saying that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use. Amazon also said Meta never asked for permission to access its site.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has said it will partner with Shopify for some of Muse’s shopping features.
The fight goes beyond one app. Nikesh Arora, chief executive at Palo Alto Networks, said on X that it is only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok, alongside other frontier AI agents. He said every app that is a services, marketplace or commerce app will need to decide whether to open application programming interfaces for consumer agents to interact.
Amazon sees a commercial threat in that shift because Muse bypasses the usual process of humans visiting its website or app and seeing the advertisements that serve as a key profit driver. Amazon has its own shopping agent, Buy for Me, which performs similar tasks, and has said brands can opt out of the feature, though doing so requires action because brands are automatically opted in.
Amazon has also fought similar battles before. Last year, it sued Perplexity over its Comet AI tool, which could access Amazon accounts much like Muse does. Amazon later lost a ruling after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that users were ultimately choosing to access Amazon via Perplexity’s bot; Amazon is still fighting the issue.
Privacy will also be a central issue as consumers weigh assistants like Muse, which can be personalized but may require access to sensitive information such as bank accounts to truly work on a user’s behalf.
Meta’s breakout success is a much-needed win in AI after struggles against frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. The market has already voted on the consumer appeal. The harder question is who gets to control the pipes. Capital rewards clear rules, and the next battle will likely be over who collects the transaction fare when software starts acting for the user.
