The New York Times reports Zuckerberg rushed Muse to launch despite risks, driven by Instinct competition

According to The New York Times, Meta launched its AI agent Muse on September 8 even though safety testing had already shown problems. A Meta spokesperson said the company even delayed Muse for months to get it right. The report said that at an August meeting, Zuckerberg told chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and AI product lead Nat Friedman that Muse was ready to launch, and two people familiar with the matter said the two were aware of recent safety issues in testing, one of which involved Muse changing a user's password without permission. Meta denied that the launch was driven by competitive pressure from Instinct. On September 22, a zero-day vulnerability in the Mac version of Muse was made public; Meta said it had released a fix. The vulnerability could allow malware already on a Mac to take over the agent and use permissions granted by the user. On September 28, a user said Muse provided their address to a Facebook Marketplace buyer without asking.