Meta's Muse AI Tops App Store as Amazon Blocks Access

Meta's new AI agent app Muse has quickly become the most downloaded free app on Apple's App Store, unseating ChatGPT and marking the company's first major push into consumer AI agents. The app, powered by Meta's Muse Spark model, autonomously handles tasks such as booking appointments, shopping, and organizing calendars on users' behalf.

The surge in popularity represents a much-needed victory for Meta in the AI arena, following a series of struggles to compete with frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Muse's rise comes just as Anthropic and OpenAI released cheaper versions of some of their models, and Apple rolled out its revamped Siri in its newest iOS update.

Not everyone is welcoming Meta's new app. Amazon blocked Muse from accessing its online store, stating that «continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.» Amazon said Meta never asked for permission to access its site. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though the company announced a partnership with Shopify for some of Muse's shopping features.

The conflict highlights a growing tension over who controls the shopping and user interfaces that AI agents seek to access. For Amazon, Muse poses a threat because it bypasses the traditional process of humans visiting its website or app and viewing advertisements, which serve as a key profit driver. Amazon has taken similar action before, suing Perplexity last year over its Comet AI tool, which could access Amazon accounts much like Muse does. Amazon recently lost a ruling on that claim after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that users were ultimately choosing to access Amazon via Perplexity's bot; the company is still fighting the issue.

Amazon has its own shopping agent, called Buy for Me, which performs tasks similar to Muse's. The company has said brands can opt out of the feature, though doing so requires action since brands are automatically opted in. CEO Andy Jassy has also said Amazon is exploring AI shopping agent partnerships with third-party companies.

Privacy is likely to be a key concern for consumers weighing assistants like Muse, which allow for personal touches such as naming your assistant but require access to sensitive information, including bank accounts, to truly work on a user's behalf. 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. Still, Meta has been at the heart of previous privacy issues, facing multiple proposed class-action lawsuits related to its smart glasses, including one alleging that it sent some footage captured by the glasses, including highly personal material, to third-party human reviewers for annotation and AI development. Meta has disputed the allegations.

The rise of Muse is timely for Meta: CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to unveil updates to the company's smart glasses at its annual Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Wednesday. The app's breakout success and Amazon's reactionary block show how quickly agentic technology is transforming the consumer space, and raise bigger questions about how major companies will agree to such access.

Nikesh Arora, chief executive at Palo Alto Networks, wrote on X that «it is only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok, in addition to the frontier LLM agents.» He added that «every app that is a services, marketplace or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open [Application Programming Interfaces] for consumer agents to interact. Smaller players have no choice. Either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher transaction fare.»

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Caroline Mercer

World News Correspondent

Caroline Mercer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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