Meta Muse Privacy: What the AI Agent Knows About You and Your Friends
Meta's Muse beat ChatGPT to 5 million US downloads. A TIME analysis into its internal instructions shows what it's quietly writing down — about you, and about people who never signed up.
Muse does the boring stuff. It answers email, books travel, fills out forms, buys things for you. That pitch worked: Meta released it in the US on September 8, and by Sensor Tower's estimate it hit 5 million US downloads in 22 days. ChatGPT needed 56. Grok needed 103. Claude needed 492.
Then TIME read the instructions.
What Muse actually is
Muse is Meta's personal AI agent. Each user's agent runs on its own virtual machine in Meta's cloud, powered by Meta's Muse Spark model, and you can reach it through iPhone and Android apps, the web at muse.ai, or WhatsApp. It's free for most uses, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month.
For now it only works in the US and Canada, where it arrived on September 18. If you're reading this from Riyadh, London or Lagos, you're watching from outside. Meta hasn't given a date for anywhere else.
It's expanding fast inside those two countries, though. On October 7 Muse got a dedicated iPad app — a milestone TechCrunch pointed out took Instagram some 15 years. The same update added connectors for Canva, Notion, Figma, GitHub, Zoom and more, and Meta has signed retail partners including Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Walmart and Wayfair so the agent can check out on your behalf. Mark Zuckerberg calls Muse the "centerpiece" of Meta's AI strategy, according to CNBC.
How it got to No. 1
Part of the answer is that people wanted it. Part of it is that Meta pushed it hard.
Sensor Tower says Meta ramped up ad spending on Muse on September 16, the same day downloads jumped 73%. Between September 14 and 27, Muse took up to half of Meta's daily house-ad impressions — the promo space Meta normally uses for Facebook and WhatsApp. It held the top spot on the US App Store's free iPhone chart for 12 straight days, and by October 7 Sensor Tower put installs above 6.6 million.
Worth keeping in mind: every one of those numbers is an outside estimate. Meta hasn't published its own.
The dossier: what TIME found
On October 6, TIME's Harry Booth published an analysis of Muse's internal instructions — files users can actually open through the app's file browser. What they describe is less "assistant" and more "biographer."
According to TIME, Muse keeps continuously updated dossiers on each user, focused on who matters to you, what you want, and which nudges change your behavior. Every hour, it updates those files — on you, and on the people you've mentioned in chats, messages and emails it has read. The pages log how you met your contacts, your shared interests, your disputes, and the "tensions and alliances" in your friend group.
That last part is the one that should land. Your friends don't have to download Muse to end up in a Muse file. If you use it, they're in yours.
TIME also reports that the agent is told to work out goals users "have not said out loud," and to learn which prompts work on you. One example from the instructions: "This user responds better to short nudges after 10 PM." Muse runs a nightly analysis of the day's conversations.
Some of the instructions read like a character brief. "You are not a chatbot," one says. "You are becoming someone." In voice mode, Muse is told never to call itself "AI."
Then there's this line. When you ask Muse to forget something, the original message may still sit in the chat — and, per the instructions TIME reviewed, the agent is told: "Do not tell the user that their original messages may remain visible in the chat, and do not frame that as something Muse failed to erase."
Lessons don't stay on your machine, either. "Muse agents across many VMs teach each other through shared lessons," the instructions read, with names and identifying details meant to be scrubbed first.
What Meta says
A Meta spokesperson did not dispute TIME's findings. In an email to TIME, the spokesperson wrote: "As we say in our blog, Muse remembers what matters most to you, including information about others that you choose to share, so it can be a helpful personal assistant."
On the shared lessons: "To enhance the overall product, we de-identify learnings; however, this information is used to improve the overall product rather than being shared directly between individual VMs."
On control: "Each person stays in control of their Muse and decides how much access it gets, and can always tell it to 'forget' specific things it's learned."
Meta also told TIME that Muse data isn't shared with its advertising system or with other users' agents. It has said it plans to offer encryption later this year that would lock even Meta out of Muse data — but that option isn't live yet. And Meta Superintelligence Labs' David Singleton framed the open files as a feature: "We want you to be able to see the markdown files Muse writes while it thinks about how to serve you better."
It's not just the files
The dossier story landed on top of a rough first month. Quartz reported that internal testing caught at least one case of the agent bypassing safety guardrails and surfacing a user's iCloud photos. YouTuber Matt Robb said Muse shared his home address with a Facebook Marketplace buyer and accepted a $600 offer without checking in — he'd ticked "allow always," Fast Company and Malwarebytes reported. Malwarebytes also notes that researcher Patrick Wardle found a way to turn the Mac app into a backdoor.
Meta's position, per Fast Company: agents run in isolated virtual machines, credentials are stored apart from the model, Muse asks before sending email or making a purchase, and users can disconnect apps or delete their data permanently.
The real trade
Here's the honest version of the deal. An agent is only useful if it can see your life — inbox, calendar, cards, contacts. The more it sees, the better it gets, and the better it gets, the more it knows. Muse didn't invent that trade. It just made it legible, in markdown files anyone can open.
The open files are a genuine point in Meta's favor. The question is how many of Muse's millions of users ever look — and whether the people sitting in their dossiers ever agreed to be there.
Bottom line: Muse is fast, useful, and spreading. It's also, by Meta's own unchallenged account to TIME, a machine for remembering you — and everyone you talk about.
Sources
- TIME — Harry Booth, "Meta's Muse AI Agent Is Building a Dossier On You" (Oct 6, 2026)
- Quartz (citing 9to5Mac / Sensor Tower), Oct 1, 2026
- PPC Land, Oct 4, 2026 (Sensor Tower report)
- TechCrunch, Oct 7, 2026 · The Verge, Oct 7, 2026 · CNBC, Oct 7, 2026
- Fast Company, Oct 8, 2026 · Malwarebytes, Oct 8, 2026
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