Meta’s Muse surges as human-assisted calls and OpenClaw inspiration draw scrutiny

Meta released Muse earlier in September 2026, and roughly two weeks later it held the No. 1 free-app position in the U.S. App Store. [6] Jefferies and Sensor Tower reported that Muse recorded more than 2.5 million global downloads in its first two weeks, surpassing Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini over the same period. [4]

A UBS note citing Apptopia said Muse was also surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT in iOS mobile downloads. [4] Meta offers the personal agent through a free tier and paid plans costing $20 and $100 per month. [6]

Meta describes Muse as a personal agent that can continue working in the background after receiving instructions, unlike a conventional chatbot. [6] It can send emails, book flights, manage schedules and shop online by connecting with services including email, calendars, payment platforms, shopping apps and smart-home systems. [6]

Nat Friedman, Meta Superintelligence Labs’ head of product, said Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw” but was itself “built from scratch.” [1] OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger separately said Meta had built its own agent while taking inspiration from OpenClaw. [6]

Meta tested a “human concierge” arrangement in which contractors quietly handled some phone calls placed through Muse, according to internal company posts reviewed by Reuters. [5][7] The company told employees about the test shortly after publicly launching a feature that lets Muse call U.S. businesses to book haircuts, check product availability or obtain contractor quotes. [5][7]

Internal posts showed that some employees warned human involvement could unintentionally expose sensitive information to call-center contractors. [5][7] A Meta Superintelligence Labs vice president acknowledged that testing contractor-placed calls without proper disclosures “was a miss,” said the feature had been rolled back for now, and reported that human callers achieved success rates of 95% to 98% in some tests. [5][7]

Muse’s early download performance puts it ahead of Claude and Gemini over a matched two-week period and ahead of ChatGPT in one iOS download comparison, giving Meta a strong initial position in consumer agents. Its relationship with OpenClaw is better understood as acknowledged product inspiration than confirmed reuse, because both Meta’s product leader and OpenClaw’s creator say the agent was independently built. The concierge experiment also demonstrates a tension between higher task-completion rates and transparent handling of private communications. What the sources don't address: whether Meta will restore contractor-assisted calling, what disclosures users would receive, or which information contractors could access.