Meta’s Muse agentic platform launched on September 8, and has earned enough buzz to top the iOS download chart in the U.S. That’s an indicator of significant curiosity if nothing else—perhaps helped along by the announcement last week that a Muse beta feature can make phone calls on behalf of users.

A Reuters report seems to confirm that these calls have been happening, but at the same time, that report is unlikely to bolster anyone’s faith in the power of AI agents. Some Muse tasks, Reuters says, have involved a “human concierge” feature that allowed a human to step in when the AI voice wasn’t up to the task.

Internal conversations at Meta apparently seen by Reuters seem to shed some light on why this may have been deemed necessary: one user apparently said when he tried to get the Muse bot to call his insurance company, the company repeatedly hung up when the bot disclosed that it was not human. When the human calling feature was added for Meta’s employee testers, they were apparently allowed to opt out.

But further internal conversations apparently also questioned the wisdom of such a feature, which some employees are apparently worried could feed sensitive user information to a human operator. ” It’s not necessarily invasive if a human contractor calls your barber, but it could be invasive if they called—and this is me coming up with my own example here—your urologist.

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