Meta’s Muse is attacking one of economy’s most profitable weak spots

For years, subscription businesses have benefited from a simple fact of consumer behavior: people are much better at signing up than canceling. 

They forget what they joined. They stop using services but keep paying. A $9 or $15 monthly charge can disappear into a credit card statement for months or even years. 

With the rollout of Meta Muse this month, an AI personal agent that can handle tasks across many areas of personal life, it quickly became clear that subscription bloat was an easy target.

Muse can help consumers identify and cancel recurring subscriptions. While subscription-management services have existed for years, Muse brings that capability into a much broader personal assistant, potentially making forgotten recurring charges much easier to surface and cancel. 

And the timing matters. Close to half (44%) of U.S. consumers increased their subscription spending in 2025, with average annual spending rising to $1,887, or about $157 a month, according to a report published by Mastercard and FT Strategies in April. Subscription spend rose 7.7% year-over-year in July, faster than overall card spending, according to Bank of America payments data, with entertainment and retail subscriptions accounting for about 43% of the total.

Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, has studied how much subscription businesses benefit when consumers fail to cancel. 

“We found that when people are forced to decide, they are about four times more likely to cancel,” Mahoney said, citing data from his 2025 American Economic Review paper “Selling Subscriptions,” co-authored with Stanford economists Liran Einav and Ben Klopack.

That distinction matters in an AI agent world.

The Stanford researchers estimated that sellers can roughly double revenue because of consumer inertia, when people forget or put off canceling, and cancellation friction, when ending a subscription takes too much time or effort. AI personal agents could weaken both, Mahoney said. But not every subscription is equally vulnerable. A physical subscription, such as pet food, is hard to forget when the product keeps arriving at your door, he said, while a digital service, such as credit monitoring, can quietly keep billing long after a consumer stops thinking about it.  

Ultimately, the AI personal agent’s intervention with this consumer psychology could have implications far beyond the subscription and influence decision-making deep within the core financial services that banks take for granted today.

“Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system,” Apollo…