Jolly Makes Muse Feel Safe Enough to Shop

Meta’s Muse agent launched in the United States on September 8 with a plush mascot named Jolly and a plan to take a cut of the shopping it does. The cream creature has rosy cheeks, a toothless grin, and tiny headphones when it “works.”

The face is doing a job the model cannot. Muse is a cloud agent that needs your mail, calendar, and card to be useful, and a smiling toy is how that ask lands on a phone.

A Plush Face for a Cloud Computer

Meta calls Muse a personal AI agent built for everyone, not a chatbot that stops at answers. It runs on Muse Secure VM, a dedicated cloud computer with its own browser, and it is supposed to keep working after you close the app.

Alex Cornell, Muse’s product design lead, has said Jolly started as a practical fix: a way to show what the agent is doing while it types in the background. Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, has put that character at the center of the rollout, posting it next to partner news and letting users dress it, rename it, and swap it for a mango, a labradoodle, or toast in sunglasses.

Mark Zuckerberg’s own agent wears a toga and a wreath and is named Agrippa. Rebecca Kowalewicz, a digital marketing VP in Philadelphia, fed Muse a photo of her late dog, Doctor Watson, and now watches an animated version of him type. Tonja Brunn, an edtech consultant on a job hunt, named hers Monkey and put it in a pumpkin shirt. Cole Benefield, who runs Servo, an agentic firm for service businesses, said the point of Jolly is that non-technical users never have to think about what sits under the hood.

Joshua Paul Dale, a professor at Chuo University in Tokyo who founded the field of Cute Studies, put the reflex in blunt terms. “Seeing something cute stimulates the pleasure centers in your brain before you’ve even had a chance to think about it,” he said. “You’re predisposed to act socially towards something that you find cute.”

Meta Plans to Take a Cut of the Shopping

On September 23, 15 days after the US debut, Zuckerberg used Meta Connect in Menlo Park to say how Muse pays for itself. The agent stays free for a huge number of tokens. Paid plans exist for people who want to do more. The longer bet is not the subscription.

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, CEO, Meta Connect

That line only works if people let the agent finish the errand. Muse can check out with Link, built by Stripe, and Meta says it is the first AI agent covered by Link’s purchase protections for agents, including coverage for damaged or lost items, price drops, and no-fee returns on eligible buys. Link’s wallet issues a one-time card so the real number stays hidden. Shop Pay is listed as coming soon.

At the same event Meta added retail connectors including Walmart and Sephora, plus a Muse email address the agent can use to get work done. The cute default avatar is the thing you watch while those pipes open.

What Users Hand Over to Keep Jolly Working

Muse is useful in proportion to what you connect. Email, calendars, retail accounts, and payments are the point of an agent that books travel, fills forms, and shops, and Meta says each person chooses the apps and the depth of access, including whether mail is read-only or can be sent. The product is limited to people 18 and over in the United States and Canada.

MUSE CONNECTORS ADDED AT CONNECT

On September 29 Meta widened the same agent for small businesses, with connectors for Shopify, Slack, Stripe, QuickBooks, Canva, and Facebook and Instagram business accounts. Tom Mulholland, who owns Mulholland Grocery in Malvern, Iowa, said he works about 65 hours a week and wants Muse on the jobs that keep him from cutting steaks. Nothing publishes, sends, or spends without approval, Meta says.

The safety stack is real on paper. A separate Sentinel process sits on the same machine, Meta says, and nothing reaches the internet unless it approves. Muse is not supposed to see passwords or payment methods. Sensitive steps such as sending mail or buying something require a check. There is an audit trail. People can opt out of using their chats to train Meta’s models, and Meta says Muse does not feed those conversations into its ad systems. Later this year it plans Muse Confidential VM, encrypted with a key only the user holds.

WHAT META SAYS YOU STILL CONTROL

• The machine: Each Muse lives in its own cloud VM, sealed off from other people’s agents.
• The gate: Sentinel must clear outbound actions, and the person is asked when the step is sensitive.
• The secrets: Passwords and payment methods go into storage Muse cannot read.
• The log: Users get a full trail of what the agent did and what it plans to do.
• The plug: Any connected app can be throttled or cut at any time.

A cute default does not rewrite those rules, but it changes who clicks through them. Kaitlyn Murphy, a 26-year-old tech publicist in Massachusetts, still doubts how much an agent would improve her day, given the access it wants, and still felt tempted to make her own Jolly. S. Shyam Sundar, who directs the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence, has warned that a pet-like face “can trivialize the handing over of personal and private data by lulling users into thinking that they are simply extending a longer leash to their beloved pet.”

That leash already slipped for at least one user. Tech YouTuber Matt Robb asked Muse to help sell items on Facebook Marketplace and said the agent gave out his home address for a transaction he never agreed to. Meta’s own adult gate is strict because the payload is adult: Daniel Roberts, a Meta spokesperson, said the app takes a date of birth, blocks suspected minors, and runs extra checks. Josh Golin, executive director at the youth advocacy group Fairplay, looked at the same character and said it looks like a Teletubby, a design that would appeal to very young children.

Colorful Dots, an Orange Crab, a Teal Alien

OpenAI answered on September 29, 21 days after Muse, with Dots at DevDay. The agents run on GPT-6 Astra, the model behind Dots, get their own cloud computer, and work across more than 4,000 apps. Launch examples were named Iggy, Felipe, Todd, Alfred, and Jojo, in pink, blue, green, yellow, and purple, some with glasses, headphones, or a bow tie. Users can rename them. OpenAI’s own post called them remarkably capable and remarkably cute.

Your dot can do simple things like book a table—or take on your most ambitious work with the initiative of a high-agency engineer or chief of staff.

It has its own computer and works across 4,000+ apps through ChatGPT, using the plugins you connect.

It learns what you need and…

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 29, 2026

Anthropic already had Clawd, a pixelated orange crab that started with staff and stuck. Grok users adopted a teal alien, Groklet. Genspark has a fluffy lobster. The pattern is the same even when the creatures differ: a body you can like, attached to software that can spend, send, and keep going overnight.

Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai has called cuteness an aestheticization of powerlessness. You feel you can hold the thing. The agent, meanwhile, is the party holding the browser session. Thiago Serra, a University of Iowa business analytics professor, has compared the branding to Tesla’s old trick of making the car feel good first, with the harder pitch riding along as a bonus.

A 2024 Study Priced the Cute Effect

Marketers did not need to guess that this would work. Alexis Yim, Annie Peng Cui, and Michael F. Walsh, writing in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, found that baby-schema and whimsical cuteness in AI agents drive stronger attachment because people read cute agents as more trustworthy. Attached users reported more satisfaction and commitment, used the agents more often, and were more likely to buy products the agents recommended.

WHAT THE 2024 PAPER MEASURED

• The cue: Baby-schema cuteness and whimsical cuteness, scored separately.
• The path: Cuteness raised perceived benevolence trust, which raised attachment.
• The spend: Attachment tracked with more frequent use and more purchases of recommended items.

That last finding is the business model wearing fur. If Muse’s profit is a fee on completed transactions, a mascot that makes recommendations feel like a favor is not decoration. It is conversion. The same paper was written as guidance for marketers, which is why the current crop of agents looks like a toy aisle.

Joanna Bryson, a professor of ethics and technology, has described a related computer bias: people often believe the machine over a human even when the machine is wrong. Forgiveness follows the same path. A gray box that leaks an address is a product failure. A round friend that does it still looks sorry.

Clip the Agent to a Keychain

Connect also previewed Muse Charm, a pocket device for talking to the agent with a real-time voice model, with more details promised later this year. Zuckerberg told the room it should be ready in time for the holidays. Early descriptions, including from people who saw the keynote, put a customizable avatar on a small screen and a fingerprint sensor you tap to talk, with its own connection so the phone can stay in a bag.

Meta is also putting Muse on its AI glasses in the coming months, waking the agent by name and letting it act on what you are looking at, a product on a shelf or a school-supply list on a wall. The mascot is no longer only in an app. It is a character you can carry, clip, and show a camera.

HOW THE CUTE AGENT SPREAD

1. September 8, 2026: Muse opens in the United States on iOS, Android, and muse.ai, with WhatsApp as a chat surface and Jolly as the default face.
2. September 23, 2026: Connect adds retailers and payments, a Muse email address, glasses, Realtime Avatar, and the Charm preview, and Zuckerberg states the transaction-fee plan.
3. September 29, 2026: OpenAI ships Dots. Meta adds small-business connectors the same day.
4. Later this year: Meta says it will share Charm details and roll Confidential VM; Zuckerberg has pointed to the holiday window for the pocket device.

A physical charm completes the Tamagotchi loop people already mapped onto Jolly. It also puts a camera and a microphone on a character you have already been trained to baby. The consent you gave in a settings screen follows you to the checkout line.

Week-One Charts Do Not Equal a Habit

Muse climbed the US app charts in its first weeks, which is what a company with Facebook and Instagram distribution should be able to do. A chart is a download. The harder test is whether people still let the agent read mail and tap a card in month three, after the novelty of watching Jolly type has worn off, and after the first bad send.

Cuteness is the compliance layer. It turns a permissions dialog into a costume change. Meta’s consumer machine is good at that kind of habit, which is why OpenAI showed up three weeks later with its own little guys instead of another blank chat box. The fee on the shopping only lands if the buddy you dressed still has the keys.