Meta says its Muse personal AI agent has signed up more than 10 million users in the United States and Canada since launching on September 8 — an adoption curve chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described as more than twice the level Threads started at, and faster than he believes any rival AI app has managed.
Speaking on Meta's October 21 earnings call, Zuckerberg said demand for the agent, which can browse the web, send emails, book travel, and complete purchases on a user's behalf, caught even the company off guard. Meta had to work with payment processor Stripe to raise credit limits within the first week because purchase volumes exceeded what either company had projected. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI news.
"We had to work with Stripe to raise credit limits since the volumes were above what any of us expected," Zuckerberg said, according to Fortune's coverage of the call.
Shopping Is the Killer Use Case
The usage data from Muse's first six weeks points squarely at commerce. A quarter of Muse adopters use the agent daily, and the most common activity is shopping, with an average purchase size of over $200, Zuckerberg told analysts.
Those numbers explain why Meta is willing to give the agent away. Using Muse is free for consumers unless they want access to more tokens or more advanced models. The business model sits on the other side of the transaction: Meta plans to charge businesses a fee whenever Muse helps complete a sale, effectively inserting itself into the checkout flow of AI-mediated commerce.
Zuckerberg argued the economics could eventually outperform Meta's core advertising business. The company generates "several hundreds of dollars annually" for each American user across its family of apps, he said, and he expects Muse to reach a higher per-user figure over time because of the commerce already flowing through the agent. Meta's advertising revenue hit $63.1 billion in the third quarter, so the bar for that claim is high — but the company is explicit that it sees agent-driven sales fees as a genuine second revenue pillar rather than a toy inside its apps.
Beyond Websites: The Personal Agent Protocol
Meta's ambition stretches past being a shopping assistant inside its own ecosystem. Chief financial officer Susan Li said the company is working with partners including Shopify and Walmart on a standard called the Personal Agent Protocol, designed to define how a consumer's AI agent can securely interact with a business's agent — no website visit required.
In that vision, the open web becomes something agents negotiate with directly. Retailers would hand over control of the shopping journey to software that decides what to buy, at what price, from whom. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Muse's usage is "going gangbusters," while questioning where the payoff for Meta actually lands — a tension that the Personal Agent Protocol is meant to resolve by making Meta the toll booth for agent commerce.
Not everyone is cooperating. Amazon blocked Muse from operating on its storefront earlier this month, prompting an industry debate over whether AI agents should be allowed to transact on sites that did not invite them — and whether an open standard or a walled garden will govern agent commerce.
Banks Are Nervous About Agents With Wallets
Muse's expansion is also colliding with the financial industry. CBS News reported this week that banks are uneasy about AI agents roaming consumers' bank accounts, as agents increasingly need payment credentials and account access to complete multi-step tasks. Consumer advocates have urged people not to hand login credentials to bots, and the consumer-protection questions — who is liable when an agent buys the wrong thing, or drains an account — remain unresolved.
This week Meta also took Muse international, launching the agent in Japan. A Meta executive told Nikkei Asia that the Japanese version will not carry ads, an early signal of how the company plans to position the agent in markets where its advertising business is less dominant.
San Francisco Chronicle coverage over the weekend framed the consumer question bluntly: Meta says its Muse AI agent can manage your money — should you let it? That question is now being asked in ten million households, and the honest answer from the industry is that the rules have not been written yet.
The Monetization Gap
The outstanding issue is the one the Wall Street Journal highlighted: usage is not the same as revenue. Meta has not disclosed what share of Muse sessions end in a completed purchase, what fee rate it intends to charge merchants, or when agent commerce revenue will begin appearing in its financial results. The company is still six weeks into an experiment that it believes will one day rival its advertising engine.
What is clear is the strategic logic. If the next computing platform is a conversational agent that acts rather than displays, the company that owns the agent owns the customer relationship — and Meta has decided it would rather tax transactions than interrupt them with ads. Whether retailers, banks, and regulators go along with that plan is the story to watch through the holiday shopping season.
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