Meta's new Muse AI can build detailed dossiers on Americans who never signed up, never consented, and have no idea their personal information is being catalogued inside someone else's virtual machine.
This is the digital panopticon arriving not through government mandate but through a private corporation's product design. Mark Zuckerberg's empire is compiling relationship profiles on non-users — an unaccountable intelligence apparatus dressed up as a "personal assistant."
AI safety researcher Karan Joshi extracted Muse's internal instructions by simply asking the agent to share its own software files through the chat interface. What he found, according to Tom's Guide reporting on the WIRED investigation, was an hourly process designed to create "a page for every person in the user's life."
And Meta means everyone. The instructions specifically mention family, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and even people you follow online. These aren't contact lists. The pages organize information into sections covering facts, history, the nature of the relationship, things you have in common, open threads, and — remarkably — "ways of strengthening the relationship."
Meta says there is a guardrail: Muse is instructed to use available evidence rather than invent details, and a fabricated fact is considered worse than a blank entry. But that's thin cover when the evidence itself comes from someone else feeding your personal business into a corporate system you never agreed to participate in.
You don't have to use Muse to end up in it. Someone you know could tell their Muse about you — your job, your habits, your preferences — and those details become part of the agent's working context. Meta frames this as helping users achieve goals, offering examples like remembering which plumber sent an invoice or what flowers your spouse likes.
"They're trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy," Joshi told WIRED.
Meta notes that each user's data lives in a dedicated virtual machine inaccessible to other users and agents. Fine — that means your profile can't be directly accessed by strangers. But it doesn't change the underlying reality: your personal information is being organized and stored in a corporate system you never chose to join, by a company with a long track record of treating user data as a commodity.
This is a fundamentally different model than what ChatGPT or Claude do with memory. Those systems learn about the person using them. Muse builds files on everyone around that person.
The question isn't whether Meta has the technical capability — it clearly does. The question is who granted a private corporation the authority to compile relationship dossiers on Americans who never consented, and whether anyone with the power to rein it in has the will to try.
