Meta rolled out on Tuesday a long-awaited AI assistant that can autonomously send emails, sell a car and book travel on a person's behalf, despite internal concerns that the technology could mismanage access to sensitive personal data.
The company's Muse agent, known internally as Hatch, is the centrepiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plan to provide "personal superintelligence" to the billions of people who use Meta's services each day.
The plan is part of the Facebook and Instagram owner's latest effort to diversify its revenue beyond advertising and build a viable business from its enormous investments in AI chips and other infrastructure, which it expects will exceed $130 billion this year.
The product will initially be available only in the US through a dedicated Muse app or Meta's WhatsApp messaging service, the company said in its announcement. Meta said it plans to add the agent to its smart glasses "soon", without providing further details.
A basic version of the agent will be available for free, while Meta will offer subscriptions priced at $20 a month and $100 a month for heavier usage, a company spokesperson said.
Users can opt out of having their interactions used to train Meta's AI models, while the company plans to introduce an encrypted version of Muse later this year, it said.
Modelled on the open-source AI agent OpenClaw, Muse is designed to access a person's apps across categories including email, calendar, payments, health, shopping and smart home devices, Meta said.
Users choose which apps it can connect to and can revoke access at any time.
Each Muse agent runs on its own virtual machine, a cloud-based emulation of a personal computer, allowing it to continue carrying out requests in the background even when a person is not actively using it.
Connecting to apps containing a person's real data increases the agent's potential usefulness while significantly raising safety risks, both for people who have entrusted it with their information and others who may be affected by an agent's mistakes.
Vishal Shah, vice president of AI products at Meta, told Reuters the company had initially delayed the product's release in April to make it more secure.
Meta determined the additional work had allowed it to "cross the threshold" and "hit the minimum bar we needed to, to be able to put this into the hands of people," he said.
"It is impossible to say that there is never going to be a mistake, but every single part of the architecture has been designed to make this as safe, as secure, as private as we can possibly make it," Shah said.
Among the protections Meta built into the Muse system is a separate agent that monitors planned actions and, in certain cases, prompts Muse to seek authorisation before carrying them out, the company said in its announcement.
