Meta's Muse Hits 2.8 Million Downloads as Zuckerberg Faces Investor Pressure at Meta Connect

Meta's Muse AI agent has reached 560,000 daily active users just 11 days after launch, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, sending Meta stock up 11% on Monday. The app has claimed the top spot on both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store. Unlike rival agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon, Muse is focused on the consumer market, handling tasks such as sending emails, organizing schedules, and shopping on a user's behalf. In testing, Muse completed multi-step tasks including a Nintendo Switch 2 game purchase, gathering moving-company quotes, booking a restaurant through OpenTable, and managing a Yahoo Fantasy Football lineup, though it was slower than manual ordering and hallucinated a fake phone number for a local restaurant. Meta's ability to convert Muse into a major AI win may hinge on convincing users to trust it with personal data, given the company's history of privacy criticism, including a $5 billion FTC settlement in 2019 and a recent social media addiction case settled with state attorneys general for upwards of $17 billion.

Alphabet has added Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to Google Cloud, a move that comes as the company's shares slipped 2.8% to $337.6795. According to Anthropic, typical workloads on Claude Opus 5.5 cost 40% less to run than on Opus 5, with output arriving more than 30% faster. Input tokens are priced at $4 per million and output tokens at $20 per million. Reuters also reported the launch. Google can earn cloud revenue from customers who choose Claude even when they pass over its own Gemini models, though the question is whether more usage and infrastructure spending make up for cheaper model calls. GuruFocus notes that its $251.63 GF Value sits 34.2% below the displayed share price, leaving investors little room for disappointing returns on AI spending.

Microsoft disrupted the EvilTokens cybercrime service through a court-authorized operation conducted with law enforcement and industry partners. The company said the operation seized 50 websites and disabled more than 150 related domains. According to Axios, EvilTokens compromised more than 12,000 inboxes across 10,000 organizations, with operators using AI to sift through stolen email for payment conversations and people worth impersonating. Microsoft shares were quoted at $497.64, a price the chart places 15.2% below the $586.84 GF Value estimate. The takedown removed infrastructure, but the article notes that preventing the next compromise is what customers will feel.