Meta’s Muse Is a Hit. Only 8% of U.S. Consumers Would Hand Meta Their Passwords

Here’s the business case, and the problem, in one survey. Muse, the new AI agent from Meta Platforms (META), gets more useful the more of your life you hand it (email, text messages, calendars), yet only 8% of U.S. consumers told Oppenheimer & Co. they’d trust Meta with their passwords, against 30% for Google. That hasn’t slowed the app. Launched Sept. 8, Muse had been No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. App Store since the previous Friday and had topped 2.5 million downloads, according to SensorTower data cited in Thursday’s Journal, and it sent Meta’s stock up 11% on Monday. How many users have handed over full access is unclear.

The upside is real. Truist Securities estimates Muse could bring Meta an extra $28.5 billion of revenue by 2030, just as investors want a payoff from Meta’s multibillion-dollar spending. So are the hurdles. Amazon.com (AMZN) blocked Muse from shopping its site on Sunday night, saying it hadn’t been told in advance or given permission, and a Raymond James analyst calls marketplaces protecting their ad businesses a major chokepoint. Rivals are close behind: a startup called Instinct has an invite-only agent, and analysts expect OpenAI to announce one within a week or two. If this space has taught anything, Truist analyst Youssef Squali said, it’s to “give Google and OpenAI a couple weeks and they’ll duplicate whatever is out there.”

Why the brokers flinched

Wall Street took it personally. On Tuesday the S&P 500’s financial sector fell 2%, and Charles Schwab (SCHW) and LPL Financial (LPLA) each dropped more than 6%, Wednesday’s Journal reported, with other brokers and big banks sliding too. Muse has teamed up with PayPal (PYPL) and the fintech Plaid, and the fear goes beyond robots replacing advisers. An agent that optimizes around the clock, shuffling money for goals like tax-loss harvesting, could leave less idle cash sitting at brokerages for them to earn on, as Citizens analyst Devin Ryan sees it. Some consultants think the selloff could reverse once incumbents catch up, since they’re the ones holding the data.

Our read

We own Meta at its existing weight, and nothing new went in this week. Muse gives the company a real shot at a return on its spending, but a lead that rivals could copy in weeks, and that a gatekeeper like Amazon can switch off, is an option rather than a moat; Squali also warned that one major hack of these agents could sour the whole category. Meta closed Friday at $751.66, down 3.33% on the day, by our desk’s numbers. Owned for the upside and sized for the headlines (IN04): that’s the position doing its job.

For households, the rule is simpler (M11): an AI agent should never hold your bank or brokerage passwords. Liability for what agents do is still largely untested, as a Wednesday Heard on the Street column noted, and an agent’s usefulness grows with exactly the access you’d least want leaked. If you want to experiment, give it a separate card with a low limit, turn on purchase alerts and keep your financial logins out of it; if it must see an account at all, read-only is the ceiling. You can always grant more access later; it’s much harder to take it back after something goes wrong.