Meta’s standoff with Amazon over Muse comes ahead of Meta Connect

Meta’s rollout of its Muse AI personal agent has been a big hit with consumers and investors. The stock has jumped more than 20% in the two weeks since its introduction, and the app has shot up to the top of Apple’s App Store, eclipsing ChatGPT.

Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage late Wednesday afternoon at the company’s annual Connect conference for developers to relish in the excitement, and described the Muse AI agent as representing the “centerpiece” of his company’s efforts to make the technology more easily available to the broader public instead of coders.

“In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals and improve their lives,” Zuckerberg said.

But there are reasons for skepticism regarding Meta’s latest effort to find a real and lasting niche in the consumer artificial intelligence market.

Meta is touting Muse’s ability to book appointments and travel, fill out electronic forms for users, and monitor home security cameras. It can also shop on a user’s behalf, searching for a specific product across various sites and marketplaces and linking to Shopify or Stripe for payment.

Amazon has said that’s a no-go, blocking Muse from purchasing products on the e-commerce app, claiming that it would violate the company’s terms of service. Whether it’s other retailers taking similar steps out of concern that they’re at risk of losing the direct relationship with customers, or it’s consumers that don’t trust the Facebook parent with sensitive data, experts say the social media giant has a long way to go to turn its early momentum in Muse into a winning product.

“People are going to be very wary,” said Joseph Turow, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on digital media and privacy. “Some people are going to dip their toes into it, and some people are going to accept it for particular companies that they trust.”

Turow said there will be “early adopters,” and then others will get “seduced into this,” seeing that using this sort of personal agent can save them money by finding the best discounts.

Zuckerberg is pushing deeper into the agentic AI market at a fraught moment for the the AI industry and for Meta. Anthropic and OpenAI are calling for a slowdown in the pace of model development as fears intensify that advanced AI is spinning out of human control and, unless it gets reined in, could threaten humanity or at least amplify cybersecurity attacks.

Meta, meanwhile, agreed last month to pay up to $17 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a host of states that alleged the company misrepresented the extent of child mental health harms caused by apps like Facebook and Instagram. The emergence of generative…