About a quarter of early Muse users use Meta's AI helper to shop, spending around $200 a purchase, while banks and experts warn that protections lag.
Meta's new AI helper, called Muse, is being used most for shopping. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said about a quarter of its earliest users look to shop with it, and the average purchase is around $200. He shared the figures with Meta's third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, the first since Muse launched on Sept. 8.
Muse is a personal AI agent. That means software that can act for you, not just answer questions. Meta says it needs no technical experience and has "no learning curve." For now it is available only in the U.S. and Canada.
Letting an AI agent buy things is called agentic commerce. John Collison, president of the payments company Stripe, said on a podcast last week that Stripe's agent-driven activity "started going vertical" in September. His brother Patrick Collison, Stripe's CEO, sits on Meta's board.
Some in the payments industry see Muse, Instinct and the open source agent OpenClaw as the likeliest paths for agents to start making purchases for ordinary consumers. The topic was a major theme at the Money20/20 financial technology conference in Las Vegas this week.
Several of the largest U.S. banks have moved to block AI agents such as Muse from reaching customers' accounts. JPMorgan Chase, the largest, was among the first. CEO Jamie Dimon discussed the issue on the bank's earnings call last week.
Cameron Fowler, CEO of Early Warning Services, a group owned by seven of the largest U.S. banks, said agent spending is far from ready for mass use. Issues such as liability, meaning who pays when something goes wrong, are still unsettled. He added that "almost none of the customer protections that you would expect to see are in place."
Zuckerberg said computing costs are too high for a wider release right now. He said a broader rollout would push the user number "significantly larger," but Meta first has to make the service more efficient. Meta also plans to earn money from Muse sooner than its normal approach for new products.
Longer term, Meta wants to connect Muse with billions of people. It also wants to build a Muse network where businesses use their own agents to deal with customers. How the bank dispute and the liability questions get resolved has not been announced.
AI helpers are starting to make real purchases, but the safety nets are not built yet, so be careful about letting one spend your money.
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