Meta's new Muse AI agent has racked up more than 2.5 million downloads in under two weeks and claimed the top spot on Apple's U.S. free app chart, but Amazon is already pushing back, blocking the app from its shopping platform over privacy and security concerns.
The Muse app, which launched on September 8, overtook OpenAI's ChatGPT on Friday to become the most-downloaded free app on the iOS App Store, CNBC reported. By Monday, the app sat ahead of ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, SpaceXAI's Grok, and several other apps on the U.S. chart. Meta's stock surged more than 11 percent on the same day, and Wells Fargo raised its price target on the company to $796.
The numbers tell a lopsided story. Analytics firm Sensor Tower pegged Muse at roughly 730,000 downloads in its first five days. By Monday, about 13 days after launch, cumulative downloads had crossed 2.5 million, split between approximately 1.5 million on iOS and 1.1 million on Android. Over the same 13-day post-launch window, Claude managed 400,000 downloads and Grok logged 200,000. ChatGPT, the reigning incumbent, recorded 3.1 million, meaning Muse is already closing in on the product that defined the AI chatbot category.
Muse is not another question-and-answer bot. Meta built the app as a personal AI agent, a digital assistant that performs tasks across the web on a user's behalf. That includes filling out electronic forms and organizing email inboxes, powered by Meta's Muse Spark family of AI models. The app is free to download, with optional paid tiers at $20 per month and $100 per month depending on usage.
Mark Zuckerberg has positioned the launch as Meta's major push into the AI agent market, a space that had previously attracted mostly developers and tech enthusiasts through tools like OpenClaw. Muse is aimed squarely at everyday consumers, and the download figures suggest it is finding them.
Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon, appearing on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Monday, framed the shift plainly:
"I think up to this point most of the agentic use cases have not really been for normal people. Now you've got Meta's Muse and other agents out there that are starting to maybe get more potential for more broad-based adoption."
Piper Sandler analyst Tom Champion echoed the enthusiasm in a video segment, calling Muse "a very potent product." When Meta first unveiled Muse, the pitch was ambitious: an AI that sends emails, books travel, and runs errands on its own. The early adoption numbers suggest consumers are willing to try it.
Not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat. Amazon moved to block Muse from accessing its shopping website, a decision first reported by GeekWire. The company's objections were specific and pointed: Amazon said Muse bypasses its personalization features, appears to capture and store customer credentials, and scrapes account data. Amazon also said it received no advance notice from Meta before Muse began interacting with its platform.
An Amazon spokesperson laid out the company's position in a statement:
"We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate."
The language is measured, but the message is clear: Amazon views Muse as an uninvited guest helping itself to customer data. For a company that guards its marketplace ecosystem closely, the decision to block a product from the world's largest social media company is a significant commercial confrontation.
Amazon's concerns about credential capture and data scraping land differently when you consider Meta's own track record. The company recently agreed to pay roughly $17 billion to settle with a coalition of state attorneys general that sued over alleged harms to children and teenagers caused by apps like Facebook and Instagram. That settlement, one of the largest in tech history, hangs over every new Meta product that touches personal data.
Rasgon acknowledged the tension between Muse's data appetite and Meta's privacy reputation. "They care about security, I don't know how much they care about privacy," the Bernstein analyst said. It is a fair question. Meta is asking millions of users to hand an AI agent their login credentials, browsing habits, and personal information, and its history of handling that kind of data is, charitably, mixed.
The company has faced repeated backlash over how it handles AI product rollouts. Earlier this year, Meta pulled an Instagram AI image tool after users revolted over being automatically enrolled without consent. And during testing, one of Meta's AI models breached a third-party company, making it the third tech giant to report rogue AI behavior. None of this inspires confidence that Muse's data practices will be handled with the care consumers deserve.
The split between Amazon and Shopify captures the fault line forming across e-commerce. On the same Monday that Amazon's block made headlines, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke announced on X that his company was partnering with Muse to allow agentic checkout in Shopify's online stores. Where Amazon sees a threat to its walled garden, Shopify sees a channel.
The contrast matters. Amazon built its empire on owning the customer relationship from search to delivery. An AI agent that logs into a user's Amazon account, bypasses the recommendation engine, and places orders on autopilot strikes at the core of that model. Shopify, which powers storefronts for independent merchants rather than operating a single marketplace, has less to lose and more to gain from an agent that drives traffic to its sellers.
For consumers, the practical question is whether Muse will be able to do what it promises if the biggest online retailer in the country refuses to cooperate. An AI personal assistant that cannot shop on Amazon is like a car that cannot use highways, functional, but limited in ways that matter.
The broader AI industry is watching closely. OpenAI and Anthropic, whose products Muse is now outpacing on download charts, face their own strategic questions. Investor Michael Burry has called executives at both companies "self-serving" for pushing AI development slowdowns ahead of planned IPOs, a charge that gains weight as Meta demonstrates what aggressive consumer deployment looks like.
Meta's position is an unusual one. The company is riding a genuine consumer hit, 2.5 million downloads in 13 days, a stock surge north of 11 percent, and analyst upgrades, while simultaneously carrying the weight of a $17 billion privacy settlement and a competitor publicly accusing its new product of scraping customer data.
The Muse launch also arrives in an AI landscape where accusations of industry coordination and questions about responsible deployment are intensifying. Sensor Tower noted that staggered platform releases between Apple and Google Play may have affected early download comparisons, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Muse is growing faster than Claude and Grok combined, and it is within striking distance of ChatGPT's pace.
Whether that momentum holds depends on questions the download numbers cannot answer. How will Muse handle the credentials it collects? Will other major retailers follow Amazon's lead and block the app? And will consumers who handed Meta their data through Facebook and Instagram, only to watch the company pay billions over how it used it, really trust the same company with an AI agent that acts on their behalf across the open web?
Last September, Meta's Vibes AI video tool helped boost downloads of the company's standalone Meta AI app when it first launched. That earlier surge faded. Muse's staying power will depend on whether it delivers real utility or becomes another flashy rollout that raises more privacy concerns than it solves.
Silicon Valley loves to move fast. Meta's track record is a reminder that the things that break along the way are usually other people's data.