Meta's Muse Agent Tops US App Store in 13 Days, Lifts Shares 11%, as Amazon Blocks It and Shopify Embraces It

Muse is built by Meta Superintelligence Labs and is positioned as a personal assistant for everyday tasks such as email, travel and online shopping, rather than a chat bot or a coding agent. Users have posted accounts of handing it bills and customer-service calls. One user said Muse navigated an Xfinity phone menu, reached a human representative and, when it hit a text verification code it could not read, patched the owner into a three-way call so the agent, the user and the representative negotiated together; the monthly bill fell by $85.30 and the price was locked for five years, about $5,118 in total savings. Another user said Muse called AT&T about fiber service at two homes, cleared the identity check, reached a retention line and cut $1,920 over 24 months, then suggested switching to bank autopay to save another $10 a month. A third said the agent cut a car insurance premium by $1,156, and others described it arranging a refund and pickup with a merchant.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon is blocking Muse. Users testing its shopping function said sending an instruction to Amazon triggers a warning that persistent access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's user agreement. Meta had no authorization from Amazon, and Amazon said it will intercept the agent when it detects it. The company took a similar stance against Perplexity's shopping agent, which it fought in court. The dispute touches advertising and traffic: if agents compare prices and place orders in the background, shoppers no longer browse recommendation feeds or click paid search placements.

Shopify moved the other way. Chief executive Tobias Lütke said Monday that the platform will integrate Muse in full, letting Meta's agent complete purchases and payments on its own, describing it as a way to offer people an easy and enjoyable route to shopping and checkout. Amazon is defending its advertising model while Shopify courts agent-driven traffic.

The resemblance to the open-source agent framework OpenClaw drew scrutiny from release day. Ansh Nanda, co-founder of an AI application, wrote on X that Muse is essentially OpenClaw for ordinary users. Developers said Muse's workspace file structure and naming rules closely match OpenClaw's, that the SOUL.md file defining an agent's persona, tone, values and behavioral limits is nearly unchanged, and that its autonomous loop and heartbeat checks carry the same fingerprints. In one test conversation, Muse itself described the overlap with OpenClaw's system file architecture as no coincidence and "highly consistent."

TechCrunch reported that Nat Friedman, product lead at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former GitHub chief executive, acknowledged the debt in public comments. He said Meta built Muse from scratch but that as a product it was heavily inspired by OpenClaw, that he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team after using OpenClaw in January, and that many colleagues came to enjoy it. He called OpenClaw author Peter Steinberger a genius whose framework was pioneering from the start, and said Meta's goal was to make something similar that is safe, reliable, easy to use and able to scale to billions of people. Asked why even the SOUL.md name was copied, Friedman replied that the team believes Steinberger was entirely right. Some commenters compared the episode to Meta's earlier adoption of Snapchat's Stories format, while other open-source developers said OpenClaw is open source and that Meta at least admitted the influence.

Truist analyst Youssef Squali wrote in a research note that as heavy users move to paid subscriptions, Muse could add $28.5 billion in revenue for Meta by 2030, calling it the company's most correct attempt yet to build a non-advertising revenue stream. The 11% move in the stock reflects bets on that door opening.