Meta’s Muse, the personal artificial intelligence agent the company launched Sept. 8, has taken Silicon Valley and Wall Street by surprise. Within days of launch the personal AI agent topped the App Store charts, a feat Meta’s earlier AI apps never managed, and Meta shares jumped more than 11% in a single session.

For a company that spent two years being asked what its AI budget was buying, that looks like the consumer AI breakthrough it has been waiting for. Whether the product underneath can hold that position is a separate question.

Muse has more than 2.5 million downloads, CNBC reported, citing Sensor Tower. That outpaces Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok over comparable launch windows, as well as Meta AI, the standalone app Meta launched last year to little effect. It trails OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which logged 3.1 million downloads in the same stretch.

The bigger risk is what Muse holds while it works. To do its job, Muse connects to email, calendars, payments, health apps and shopping accounts. Meta shipped it despite internal concerns that the agent mismanages access to sensitive data, Reuters reported. Employees testing it during launch week described cases where it disconnected without explanation and uploaded sensitive information without permission, according to internal posts Reuters reviewed.

Meta delayed the launch from April to work on security. ” The launch came less than two weeks after Meta agreed to an $18 billion multistate settlement over social media harms, TechCrunch noted , Muse also asks users for more of their data than any Meta product before it.

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