Meta Muse AI Agent Shopping|20% Stock Rally Despite Amazon's Block?

An agent built to buy, a store that says no

Meta has expanded its Muse AI agent so it can shop at Walmart and Sephora, book Expedia hotels, and operate your Mac. Yet Amazon has blocked Muse from buying anything, and the same week a jury found Facebook deceived users about privacy. Users who ask Muse to check out on Amazon hit a message.

It reads: "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed." Investors have looked past the block. Meta's stock jumped more than 20 percent in the two weeks after Muse was introduced. The Expedia deal shows the position Meta is reaching for. Travelers describe dates, destination and hotel preferences, and Muse presents options and makes the booking.

Expedia remains the merchant of record. But the payment is completed through Muse. At Connect, Zuckerberg outlined the potential business model for the agent. For now, the basic version is free. Subscriptions cost twenty dollars and one hundred dollars a month for heavier use. A seat at checkout only pays if two parties let Meta in. The store has to accept the agent. And the user has to hand it the keys.

Why Meta needs this seat

Meta is pushing this hard because of the early response. Sensor Tower data show Muse reached 2.8 million downloads in its first twelve days across the U.S. and Canada. On Apple's store in those two countries, Muse logged 1.8 million downloads in that window. ChatGPT had 1.3 million over the same stretch after its own launch. Muse also overtook ChatGPT as the leading free iPhone app in the United States.

CNBC notes Meta had been late to generative AI, badly trailing OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. A couple of months earlier, Meta's stock was slumping. Investors questioned its plan to spend up to 145 billion dollars this year on capital expenditures for AI. Business Insider wrote that investors now see Muse as the company's clearest shot yet at turning that investment into a meaningful new business.

One analysis on Yahoo Finance described the shift. Rather than relying only on AI to sharpen advertising, Meta could facilitate transactions and capture value from them. That makes every store's decision part of Meta's payback. And the biggest store has already decided.

The stores hold the first key

Amazon's objection is framed around security, not rivalry. According to GeekWire's reporting, Amazon says Meta failed to notify it of the agent's activity. Amazon also says the agent does not properly identify itself. And it says Muse captures user credentials.

An Amazon spokesperson said third-party apps that buy on behalf of customers "should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate." Meta has pushed back against those characterizations. Amazon can afford to refuse. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that 90 percent of U.S. Amazon customers began their shopping at Amazon.com in 2024.

Only 6 percent started with Google. So an agent that shops everywhere except Amazon misses the place where most of those shopping trips begin. The Los Angeles Times pointed to a business motive as well. Amazon has its own AI models, so it has little incentive to welcome a competitor's agent. Amazon's block suggested the big platforms would close ranks. Many did the opposite.

At Connect, Meta added shopping connectors for Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora and Wayfair, plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments. But look at the terms Expedia kept. It stays the merchant of record. And no date has been given for when Expedia in Muse will be available. Expedia is also part of Google's agentic booking launch, alongside Booking.com and Marriott. Its door is open to more than one agent.

Expedia had reason to hedge. One Financefeeds analysis counted it among four companies most often named as agentic-commerce casualties. Between Muse's launch and the September 24 close, those four shed about 35 billion dollars in value, by that count. The same writer argued the Amazon standoff will end in "not a permanent block, but a metered, priced, rate-limited agent lane."

If that view is right, stores will set the price of the very checkout seat Meta is reaching for.

The user holds the second key

The second permission belongs to the user, and Muse asks for a lot. WIRED reported it easily connects to email and bank accounts. WIRED's Reece Rogers found Muse kept suggesting that users add more personal data, so it could read their financials and other information. Inc writer Jason Aten described something sharper.

He said Muse sent a push notification about a text conversation he was having, and offered to research a column. Aten said, "I never gave it permission to read my messages." When Aten asked how it knew, Muse said it used push notifications, not the messages themselves. Aten is sure that is not true. He found that Muse syncs messages to Meta's servers.

On his device, the sync had reached row 187,462 of his Messages database. Meta's own description of Muse for Mac promises tasks done "all with your explicit permission." Meta also says Muse seeks approval before sensitive actions. Aten's account is one user's report. But it touches the same point Amazon raised: what the agent reaches without announcing itself.

A promise already judged

In the same week, a jury in Santa Fe ruled on an older Meta promise. It found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy protections. The jury found over 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection law. The state asked for the maximum penalty of 5,000 dollars per violation. Judge Francis Mathew will decide how much Meta must pay.

The Santa Fe New Mexican reported the judge could potentially order billions in penalties. A Meta spokesperson said the company disagrees with the verdict. The jury singled out one statement. In 2010, Zuckerberg said: "You have control over how your information is shared." He added: "We do not share your personal information with people or services you don't want."

The jury found more than two million violations based on that statement alone. Now, Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez describes Muse as having "built-in protections and user controls that put people absolutely in charge of how they use it." Both are promises of control. A jury has already weighed the first one. Cambridge Analytica was a story about a third party.

A personality quiz app was downloaded by 270,000 Facebook users. Through them, its creator gathered data on at least 87 million of their friends. That is roughly 320 people for every person who took the quiz. Muse is also a third party, sitting between users and the stores they shop. Amazon's complaint is that it captures credentials.

Bank of America analyst Ebrahim Poonawala named the precedent: "scaled platforms are plugging payment credentials into a third-party agent."

What decides the lane

Banks see the same gap. A report from a group including Bank of America and Capital One warned agent shopping could raise the risk of scams, fraud and privacy breaches. The report said consumers "are not sure whether they will be protected or who they will need to go to if things go wrong." That is the question a store answers when it lets an agent pay. Expedia answered by keeping the merchant role for itself.

So the opening tension reads differently now. Amazon's block and the privacy verdict ask one question: who controls what the agent touches. The thing to watch is Expedia's hotel booking going live inside Muse. No date has been given. If it launches with payment completed through Muse, Meta shows a major merchant will share checkout, while Expedia keeps its customer.

If it stalls, Amazon's closed door looks more like the rule. Then Meta's transaction business waits on terms set by the stores.

Informational only, not investment advice. Figures and quotes come from the linked reports.