Meta’s Muse Rally Prices a Fee the Agent Has Not Taken

Meta’s Muse agent passed 3.4 million downloads in the United States and Canada, per Sensor Tower estimates published September 25, and the stock had jumped roughly 13% in the week Wall Street started rewriting its notes. Shares still closed September 25 at $751.66, down 3.33% on the day, after a run that put September on pace for Meta’s best month since July 2013.

The catch-up story writes itself. The product that is supposed to pay for it does not run ads, does not yet collect a published fee, and already lost Amazon.com as a place to shop.

Muse Makes Money Only When Someone Pays

Meta launched the personal AI agent built for everyone on September 8 on iOS, Android, the web at muse.ai, and WhatsApp. It is a worker, not a chatbot. It runs in a dedicated cloud virtual machine with its own browser, connects to mail and calendars, fills forms, and can check out with a one-time card from Stripe’s Link wallet.

Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said the agent lives in “its own isolated environment” and “never sees your actual passwords or payment details.” Meta’s product page says logins sit in a credential store the agent cannot read, and that conversations are not shared with ad systems. Eligible buys are covered by Link’s purchase protections, a first for agents, according to Meta.

There is no advertising inside Muse. The paid path is a free tier, then Power at $20 a month and Maximum at $100. Wang told interviewers the vast majority of people should stay inside the free lane, which launch materials pegged at about 100 million tokens a week. The line that moved the stock is the one Mark Zuckerberg gave developers at Connect on September 23.

We’re standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens, with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, at Connect 2026

He also said, “We believe that Muse will make you money.” The fee is a plan. Meta has not published the cut, who pays it, or when it starts. Futurum chief executive Daniel Newman called the agentic platform “taking over the internet.” That is the download story. The cash story is a toll on purchases and bookings that has not been switched on.

HOW META SAYS MUSE WILL PAY

• Free lane: Everyday tasks sit on a metered free tier Zuckerberg says will stay large.
• Two paid rungs: Power at $20 and Maximum at $100 a month cover heavier use, not the take-rate.
• Transaction cut: A small fee on purchases, bookings, and other closes, still undated and unpublished.
• No ads in the chat: Muse conversations are kept off Meta’s ad systems, per the product page.

Ads still pay almost all of Meta’s bills. Muse is asking investors to value a consumer product that is built to sit beside that machine, not feed it.

Trackers Count Millions While the Till Shows Cents

Sensor Tower is the working tally here. It had Muse above 3.4 million downloads as of the snapshot published September 25, after 2.8 million in the firm’s “first two weeks” window from September 8 to September 17. In that stretch the app averaged 55% day-over-day download growth. ChatGPT averaged 24% in its first 10 days on mobile, the same firm said. Daily active users rose 27% on the Wednesday after Connect wrapped.

Muse hit No. 1 among free apps on the U.S. App Store on September 18 and on Google Play on September 19. It is still limited to the United States and Canada. Apptopia counted 1.8 million iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada over the first 12 days, against 1.3 million for ChatGPT’s own first 12 days in 2023. Other firms looking at the same week put total installs between 2.3 million and 4.3 million, which is why the 3.4 million figure is the one this piece carries, with Sensor Tower named.

SENSOR TOWER’S EARLY TALLY

• Installs: More than 3.4 million in the U.S. and Canada as of the September 25 snapshot.
• Open: 2.8 million through September 17, with 55% average day-over-day growth in that window.
• After Connect: Daily active users up 27% the Wednesday the keynote landed.
• Paid push: House ads were 6% of impressions through September 19; by September 22 Muse sat among the top 10 brands by ad spend.

Meta is not letting the app coast on word of mouth. Sensor Tower said house ads for Muse went live September 9 and, within 10 days, took most of the promotional slots across Meta’s own apps, ahead of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The company also bought space on Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube. That is advertising for Muse, not advertising inside it.

Early users already put the agent on jobs that look like money. Practitioners have it scanning credit-card bills, hunting forgotten subscriptions, and drafting pause requests for weak ad sets through Meta’s own ads tools. Researcher Jane Wong wrote that Meta is working on Meta Pay for Muse, a first-party wallet for the agent. If that ships, the cut Zuckerberg described has a pipe. Until then, downloads are a usage chart, not a revenue line.

Amazon Closed the Biggest Cart

The take-rate only works if the agent can finish a buy. On the evening of September 20, Amazon started blocking Muse from shopping on Amazon.com. Users who sent the agent there saw a warning that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use.

Amazon said Meta did not get consent, that Muse did not identify itself as an agent while browsing, and that the system appeared able to capture and store customer credentials and open account pages and order history when asked. An Amazon spokesperson said third-party apps that buy on a customer’s behalf should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” and that Amazon had asked Meta to remove Amazon from the experience.

Meta’s account is the Secure VM story: credentials in protected storage, a supervisor called Sentinel on sensitive actions, a one-time card at checkout. Those two descriptions can both be true in engineering terms and still fail Amazon’s rules. A system can hide a password from its model and still log in as the shopper. Amazon’s terms already bar autonomous agents unless they identify themselves and do not disguise as humans.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The block: Amazon cut Muse off Amazon.com starting the evening of September 20.
• The charge: No advance consent, no agent identification, and a dispute over stored credentials and account scraping.
• The other door: Shopify’s catalog is in Muse; Shop Pay and PayPal were added as pay rails around Connect.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• A deal: Amazon said the two companies were talking and did not say whether it would sue.
• The cut: No public take-rate, no start date, no rule on who pays, merchant or user.
• Charm’s price: Zuckerberg said the pocket device would be ready for the holidays; Meta’s recap only promised more later this year.

The split in retail is the second-order fight. Shopify chief executive Tobi Lütke said on September 21 that Shopify would work with Muse on agentic checkout through Shop Pay. PayPal said on September 22 that Muse users could shop at PayPal merchants, with Store Sync still limited to U.S. physical goods in dollars. Amazon already keeps checkout on its rails in its creator programs. Muse ran into the same wall: the agent can want the cart. The store still owns the cart.

How Wall Street Is Pricing a Free Agent

KeyBanc managing director Justin Patterson told clients Meta had gone “from being viewed as a laggard in the past couple of months, to being viewed as a leader once again.” He also said, “We now have a consumer-facing AI product, which frankly, many companies have struggled with.” As of the September 27 notes that followed Connect, the stock carried 73 Buys, 6 Holds, and 0 Sells, with consensus at $787.

That average sits under several fresh targets that treat Muse as a second engine. JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth raised his target to $920 from $820 and wrote that Muse could bring “an extremely capable personal agent to billions of users.” Patterson moved KeyBanc to $900 from $780. Piper Sandler’s Thomas Champion went to $875 and sketched $44 billion of Muse revenue in 2030 that is not in his published estimates. TD Cowen’s John Blackledge went to $865 from $750 and modelled Muse at $55 million in 2026 and $27 billion in 2030, about 6% of Meta in that year of his model. Those 2030 figures are two different desk exercises, not a blended forecast.

Raymond James analyst Josh Beck put daily downloads above 300,000 and sketched a mid-case in which Muse costs no more than $12 billion a year to run and could approach $50 billion in revenue. Evercore ISI framed the week as “Muse over Metaverse.” Cantor Fitzgerald’s Deepak Mathivanan said Meta has “several paths to a profitable freemium model.” None of those paths is a filed number. Consensus at $787 is the street’s average. $920 is one bank’s ceiling. They are not the same claim.

Patterson now looks for 2027 revenue of $313.8 billion, up 23%, then $378.7 billion in 2028. Those years still rest on ads. Muse is the option the notes are attaching on top.

Superintelligence Labs Closed the Llama Door

Muse did not arrive from a side project. After Llama 4 landed poorly in 2025, Zuckerberg built Meta Superintelligence Labs, put Wang in as chief AI officer, and spent $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI to bring Wang and his team in-house. Nat Friedman, the former GitHub chief, took AI products. The mandate was personal superintelligence, an agent that acts for one person, not a model family given away as weights.

THE YEAR THE MODEL WENT CLOSED

1. June 2025: Meta Superintelligence Labs is formed under Wang after the $14.3 billion Scale AI stake.
2. April 8, 2026: Muse Spark ships as MSL’s first model, built for Meta’s own products, with a private API preview rather than public weights.
3. September 8, 2026: The Muse agent app opens in the U.S. on phones, web, and WhatsApp.
4. September 23, 2026: Connect puts Muse on glasses, adds retail connectors, and previews Muse Charm.

On April 8 Meta said Superintelligence Labs had rebuilt its AI stack in nine months and that Spark would power Meta AI across apps and glasses. Spark is small and fast by design, Meta wrote, with larger models already in training. Later open-weight pieces such as Muse Glimmer sat beside that closed flagship. The consumer agent runs on the closed line. Patterson’s “team has been on fire” line is about that rebuild, not about Llama.

Newman’s “out of nowhere” was the public timing. The lab work sat in plain sight for a year. What changed in September is that a consumer surface finally showed a chart the ads business could not produce on its own: an agent people open on purpose.

Charm Is Still a Holiday Promise

Connect was a distribution show. Meta said Muse will come to AI glasses in the coming months, so a wearer can say the agent’s name and point it at a shelf or a flyer. Voice mode is meant to keep working in the background during a long talk. Muse gets its own email address. Computer use on Mac was listed as arriving so the agent can work inside files, messages, calendar, notes, and mail.

Muse Charm is the pocket object Zuckerberg held up in Menlo Park on September 23. Meta called it a device built to talk to Muse, with a real-time voice model, that fits in a pocket, and said it would share more later this year. Zuckerberg told the room it would be available in time for the holidays. There is still no price. The skeptical read is fair: WhatsApp already hosts the agent, glasses are next, and a keychain with a mic is a third way to reach a product that has not proven it needs a new gadget.

The shopping list is more concrete. Meta said it launched with dozens of partners and the Shopify catalog, and that it is adding Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora and Wayfair, plus American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Michael Kors, and Ulta, with Shop Pay and PayPal for payments. Expedia is coming for travel. Instacart is listed for groceries. Notion, Granola, GitHub, and Box sit on the work side. Meta’s welcome mail to developers put connector submissions above 2,000 in the first few days.

WHERE MUSE IS SUPPOSED TO CLOSE A BUY

• Retail: Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Ulta, Wayfair, Fanatics, and the rest of the Connect list, on top of Shopify’s catalog.
• Pay rails: Stripe Link at launch, then Shop Pay and PayPal, with a first-party Meta Pay wallet still unreleased.
• Travel and food: Expedia coming; Instacart listed for the kitchen.
• Work: Notion, Granola, GitHub, and Box, plus a developer path for custom connectors.

Hardware around the agent is a separate pile. Ray-Ban Meta Audio starts at $399. Hearing enhancement for supported glasses is $149.99, or bundled with a Meta One plan. Meta VR Glasses are listed at about 100 grams. Meta says it will offer more than 100 AI glasses options across Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Meta Glasses by year-end. BofA’s Justin Post called Muse a possible killer app for Reality Labs. That is a hope hanging on glasses and Charm, not a sales figure.

Zuckerberg told Connect he expects Muse, in the coming years, to grow into “the personal superintelligence that billions of people around the world are going to use to accomplish their goals.” The stock already paid for a version of that sentence. The agent can negotiate a bill and, on a bad day, move faster than a user is watching. Amazon decided the store, not the shopper’s helper, sets the terms. Until Meta names the fee, posts a take-rate, and reopens the cart that closed on September 20, Muse is a hit app sitting on a business model that is still a speech.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Meta Platforms, the Muse agent, and related analyst notes. It is informational only and is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell META or any other security, or a forecast of downloads, take-rates, or earnings. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser or other qualified professional before making investment decisions. Figures, ratings, price targets, and product statuses reflect the company statements, tracker estimates, and analyst notes cited here as of late September 2026 and can change.