Piper Sandler Cuts Rollins to Neutral on Agentic AI Threat

Meta Platforms' artificial intelligence agent Muse is dividing US stocks this week. Muse is a service that lets users hand tasks such as shopping, booking travel, and filling out documents to an AI agent, and it has become the top free app by downloads on Apple's App Store and Google's Google Play in the United States and Canada, overtaking the conversational AI ChatGPT. According to market research firm Sensor Tower, the app reached 2.8 million downloads within two weeks of release, with average daily downloads growing 55 percent per day over its first ten days. Among investors, concern is spreading that, given the scale of Meta's business, Muse will become a powerful comparison-shopping tool, making it easier for consumers to find cheaper alternatives and weakening the customer lock-in that established players have long maintained. While these developments weighed on multiple sectors this week, shares of Meta and AI infrastructure-related companies have risen, with Meta's stock surging nearly 12 percent this week and on track for a fifth straight weekly gain.

Meta went live with an agent-commerce layer at Meta Connect 2026, expanding its Muse ecosystem so that the Muse Spark personal AI agent can shop and check out on behalf of users. Meta confirmed that PayPal global Muse payments will let customers shop and check out using their Muse personal AI agents across PayPal merchants worldwide, while Shopify and Stripe have integrated their Shop Pay and Link wallets to enable agent-native commerce infrastructure, with Muse able to search the Shopify catalog and execute checkout directly in-app. The connectors also include Expedia and Instacart, effectively turning the Muse agent into a digital wallet. The technical leap is the Muse computer-use capability, which runs in a Muse Secure VM, an isolated Linux virtual machine in the cloud, letting the agent interact with native macOS apps like Files, Mail and Calendar and drive a full browser. Meta also unveiled the Luna camera-free smart glasses with six microphones, open-ear speakers and a dedicated AI button, though Muse-on-glasses was only teased as coming soon and was not shipped at the keynote, with 2.5M US downloads as of September 20. Amazon has blocked Muse from its platform, a revealing exclusion that suggests the future of commerce may be a battle between open agent-accessible platforms and walled gardens, and the industry is building ahead of the GENIUS Act enforcement cliff looming on January 18, 2027.