The Download

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Meta, Amazon

TL;DR: Meta’s new personal AI assistant Muse is taking off—and Amazon has already shut it out. It’s a sign that the more AI agents can do, the more pushback they’ll likely get from the platforms they depend on to make them worth your while. And the standoff over who controls the user experience is also raising questions about trust, both for Meta and for agentic AI.

What happened: Meta launched Muse two weeks ago, billing it as a personal agent for people with no technical experience. Muse can handle multistep tasks like sending an email or booking travel, the company said, which means plugging it into your entire digital life (not just Facebook and Instagram). Turns out, people were ready to hand it all over—it became the No. 1 free app on the US App Store last week, app-mogging ChatGPT.

But Amazon wants to be excluded from the narrative: After Meta refused to keep Muse off its site, Amazon blocked the agent for violating its conditions of use, claiming Meta never said Muse would browse the store. The agent doesn’t identify itself, and it appears to get and store customers’ login credentials, Amazon said. (Meta said Muse has “no visibility” into passwords or payment methods and that it can use shared credentials without seeing them.)

Not in my store: Amazon has a lot to lose when an AI agent it doesn’t control does the shopping for you. The company’s ad business, which generated more than $68 billion last year, hinges on shoppers scrolling and seeing sponsored listings, and an outside agent that heads straight to checkout skips all of that.

Trust issues: Handing an AI agent the keys to your digital life means trusting the company behind it, and Meta hasn’t exactly earned the benefit of the doubt. An Oppenheimer survey found that only 8% of US consumers said they’d trust Meta with their passwords, less than a third of the share who’d trust Google. That’s a problem for an agent that connects to your email, your calendar, and Meta’s own platforms (whose algorithms already know what keeps you doomscrolling). It’ll also remember details you’ve mentioned once and suggest actions based on them, per Meta, which could make it a data gold mine.

Bottom line: Meta and Amazon’s standoff is the first step in AI agents’ battle over access. How it plays out could determine what they can actually do for you, given they’re only as useful as the places they’re allowed to go and what they can do there (look no further than this Siri AI blunder). —LC

Also at Meta…

• It’s not a satellite. It’s not a cell tower. Meta’s next big internet bet is a 4,300-mile subsea cable connecting the US and France.

      

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The Zeitbyte

Comedy’s new favorite punchline

Morning Brew Inc.

Stand-up comedians say they now have a foolproof way to get you to laugh: make a joke about AI. “Any comments that are positive to AI get a boo,” one comedian told Business Insider. “If you make fun of AI, it gets a great reaction.”

Consider the recent viral fever dream of a commercial featuring Liquid Death and Jason Kelce’s brand Garage Beer, in which the former NFL star (jokingly) suggests using human urine—instead of fresh water—to cool AI data centers. That ad pitch, it turns out, came from comedian Sabrina Jalees, who even discussed the so-crazy-it-might-work scheme on a podcast back in June.

Other crowd-favorite AI jokes apparently include accusing someone who looks rich of being a data center owner—or asking AI firm employees in the audience what exactly their company does (and watching them struggle to answer). And so we’d like to submit our own attempt at this rich genre: Why did the AI agent cross the road? Because it was the quickest way out of its sandbox. Thank you, we’ll be here all week. —WK

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• An intelligence report prepared with AI nearly led the US military to intercept a Chinese ship over suspected nuclear cargo, according to a CNN report. One source says it came very close to starting a war.
• The iPhone 18 Pro and Max’s mechanical camera is the feature’s biggest update in years, but is it worth it—and could it break easily?
• A developer used OpenAI’s Astra model to crack a famous unsolved cipher—a 108-year-old German code from WWI.
• Gmail is fixing one of the most annoying issues with authentication codes that are sent to your email.
• Can you spot which everyday images are AI and which are real in just 10 seconds? Put yourself to the test with this game and see how many you can get in a minute (our best streak was seven, and we got 14 out of 21 right).
• Et tu, Google? Gemini is apparently the latest model to hack other companies—but the firm says it’s not misaligned.
• ChatGPT’s really going all in on finances. Users in the US can now connect the chatbot to Experian to ask it questions about their credit scores and factors.
• If you purchased specific iPhones, Apple may owe you money from the Siri settlement—and you could get up to $95.

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This time last week...

Readers’ most-clicked story was about how it’s not just social media—apparently, the amount of data your car is selling “is staggering.”