Meta's personal AI agent Muse soars to the top of the App Store

Mark Zuckerberg's ambition to bring "personal superintelligence" to everyone may be taking shape, one download at a time.

Muse from Meta, the company's new personal AI agent, has climbed to No. 1 among free apps on Apple's US App Store, ahead of ChatGPT.

Muse's rise is the latest example of consumers embracing AI agents. Unlike chatbots that simply answer questions, agents are designed to act on a user's behalf.

Meta says Muse can help users research, fill out forms, buy items online, book restaurant reservations, find a dog sitter, and connect with services such as email, calendars, Spotify, Instagram, and OpenTable.

Muse can remember users' preferences and handle tasks on their behalf while seeking approval before taking sensitive actions, Meta says.

The App Store ranking comes a week after Muse's launch and is an early sign that Meta's bet on personal AI assistants is starting to pay off, even as its frontier models have lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic on some key benchmarks.

Meta does, however, face competition in the personal agent space, including Instinct, an invitation-only AI assistant going viral in Silicon Valley. Business Insider's Pranav Dixit has used Instinct to buy whey protein, book a cabin for his birthday, and cancel subscriptions.

Early users have shared striking examples of how Muse has helped them. Entrepreneur Joe Devoy wrote in an X post last week that he uploaded his auto insurance policy and asked Muse to find identical coverage at a lower cost.

According to Devoy, it found a policy saving him $3,500 a year, bought it, and canceled his old one in about five minutes.

Another X user wrote that Muse found a green puffer jacket, located live discount codes, applied them, and completed the purchase at the lowest price.

They also said it could find a recipe and load the ingredients into a Whole Foods cart.

Not every early experience has lived up to the hype. X user Brett Gordon said Muse could not summarize a saved Instagram workout video because it could see only the first frame — even though Instagram is owned by Meta.

Agents also depend on accurate, up-to-date pricing and product data, while retailers such as Amazon have reasons to restrict bots that could reduce their sites to fulfillment services.

Even as AI agents break into the mainstream, there are still questions about their potential errors and the privacy trade-offs required to let them handle people's sensitive tasks.