Meta's Muse Agent Targets Subscription Bloat and a Profitable Consumer Weak Spot

Consumers forget what they joined, stop using services but keep paying, and let $9 or $15 monthly charges disappear into credit card statements for months or years. Subscription-management services have existed for years, but Muse puts that capability inside a broader personal assistant, potentially making forgotten recurring charges easier to surface and cancel.

The CNBC report cited an April study from Mastercard and FT Strategies, which found that close to half, or 44%, of U.S. consumers increased their subscription spending in 2025, with average annual spending rising to $1,887, or about $157 a month. Bank of America payments data showed subscription spending rose 7.7% year over year in July, faster than overall card spending, with entertainment and retail subscriptions accounting for about 43% of the total.

Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, has studied how much subscription businesses benefit when consumers fail to cancel. He cited data from his 2025 American Economic Review paper "Selling Subscriptions," co-authored with Stanford economists Liran Einav and Ben Klopack. "We found that when people are forced to decide, they are about four times more likely to cancel," Mahoney said.

The Stanford researchers estimated that sellers can roughly double revenue because of consumer inertia, when people forget or put off canceling, and cancellation friction, when ending a subscription takes too much time or effort. Mahoney said AI personal agents could weaken both. Not every subscription is equally vulnerable. A physical subscription such as pet food is hard to forget when the product keeps arriving at your door, he said, while a digital service such as credit monitoring can quietly keep billing long after a consumer stops thinking about it.

The consumer behavior shift could extend beyond subscriptions and into core financial services. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok wrote in an analysis last week that Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system, Slok wrote.

Consumers already were becoming more aggressive about cutting subscriptions. The report cited ScribeUp, which builds subscription-management technology into banking apps for banks, credit unions and fintech companies, as saying its members are now 1.8 times more likely to initiate a cancellation than they were a year ago. "More of life is becoming a recurring bill. Those bills cost more every year, and it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to keep track of everything they are paying for," said Jordan Mackler, the company's co-founder and CEO. He said the increase predates ScribeUp's newer AI capabilities and reflects a broader change in consumer behavior.

According to the company, the median ScribeUp user now has more than 12 recurring subscription payments, while 1 in 4 has 20 or more. The share of users with at least eight rose from 62% to 71% over the past year.

Price hikes can accelerate exits. Mackler said cancellations at an individual merchant can jump as much as 50% when prices rise. Health and fitness subscriptions have seen the sharpest increase in cancellation activity, up 3.8 times year over year, followed by video streaming at 2.2 times, news and media at 2.1 times, and music streaming at 1.9 times.

Mackler said AI is increasing the number of subscriptions ScribeUp can help consumers manage. The company currently tracks roughly 200,000 unique recurring billers. Before adding its newer agentic capabilities this year, it could automate cancellations for only a few hundred major subscription companies. The average canceled subscription costs $17.39 a month, and Mackler said ScribeUp saves users more than $300 a year on average on recurring bills they did not realize they were paying for or no longer needed.

Subscription companies are already dealing with significant customer turnover, according to CNBC.