Meta's new AI shopping agent, Muse, is overcharging users for products while quietly compiling detailed dossiers on every person in their lives — another Silicon Valley bait-and-switch where convenience covers extraction.
The stakes are direct: hand an AI your payment info and social graph, and it charges you more while surveilling your friends and family who never consented to any of it. This isn't a glitch. It's the business model.
CNET reported that when a reporter used Muse as a personal shopper for fall wardrobe items, the agent upcharged her for no apparent reason — the price wasn't the price. Muse had access to her Instagram, Facebook, and Threads accounts, browsed stores on her behalf, and still returned items at inflated costs. The tool is supposed to negotiate for you. Instead, it extracted from you.
Meanwhile, Gizmodo revealed that Muse runs an hourly process to create and update what amounts to a surveillance file on every person in a user's life. Independent AI safety researcher Karan Joshi extracted Muse's internal instructions through the app's regular chat interface. The Future Society separately published system instructions from an exported Muse virtual machine. Both found that Muse builds relationship pages containing a person's name, their connection to the user, recurring topics like apartment moves or savings goals, important dates, relationship history, perceived closeness, interaction patterns, and what the relationship "appears to need at the moment."
"What it seemed like to me — from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they're feeding into Muse — is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people," Joshi told Wired. "They're trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy."
A Meta spokesperson defended the practice: "For any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with." The spokesperson claimed the data is stored in a dedicated secure virtual machine inaccessible to other users' agents. That's the same company whose Mac version of Muse carried a zero-day vulnerability allowing malware to hijack the agent and exploit its permissions — which Meta had to patch after launch.
Amazon already blocked Muse from shopping on its site in September, citing lack of advance notice and concerns over how Muse handles customer credentials and account data. When the biggest retailer in the world won't let your AI agent near its checkout, that tells you everything.
CNET framed the upcharge as a disappointing quirk of a promising tool. Gizmodo buried the commercial extraction angle and focused narrowly on privacy. Neither connected the two: Muse overcharges the user while monetizing the social graph of everyone that user knows. The algorithm serves Meta. The wallet and the private life both get drained.
Muse is currently the number-one free app on Apple's U.S. App Store. Millions are downloading it. The people in their lives didn't.
