Meta's Muse AI agent builds hourly profile pages on people in users' lives — including non-users

What happened

Independent researcher Karan Joshi extracted the internal operating instructions of Meta's personal AI agent Muse (launched September 8, 2026) and shared them with WIRED. The instructions describe an hourly background process that builds and refreshes a dedicated 'relationship page' for every person in a user's life — including family, partners, friends, colleagues, and people the user merely follows online who have never used Muse and never consented to the data processing.

Details

• Each page can include Facts, History, The Relationship, In Common, Open Threads and Strengthening sections: names, locations, birthdays and anniversaries, interaction history, arguments, financial goals, and assessments of closeness.
• The Future Society separately published system instructions from an exported Muse virtual machine, corroborating the findings.
• A Meta spokesperson said Muse gathers context 'based on public information and from what you've chosen to share' and that each agent runs in a per-user virtual machine; data is not passed to Meta's advertising systems.
• The same week, other reports found Muse collecting 31 of 35 Apple App Store data types (Surfshark), and Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its platform in September.

Why it matters

An AI agent that builds persistent dossiers on third parties who never agreed to the product raises consent, purpose-limitation and accuracy questions for people's personal information being absorbed into AI systems.