Meta's new AI agent Muse will help you plan a dinner party. It will also build a file on everyone you invite.
Muse is Meta's AI agent, and millions of people have already downloaded it. To carry out tasks on a user's behalf, Muse creates detailed profiles of the people in that user's life, drawing on whatever personal information it can access. The tradeoff is built into how the product works: the more Muse knows about your friends and family, the better it performs the requests you give it. That means the privacy cost of using Muse does not stop with the person who installed it.
Nobody in your contacts list agreed to be profiled. You did, by downloading the app, but your friends, family, and coworkers did not get a say in the data Muse compiles about them. That gap between who consents and who gets profiled is the real cost of agentic AI that needs personal context to be useful.
Meta has been down this road before, from Cambridge Analytica to years of fights over facial-recognition data. Muse looks like the same tradeoff wearing a friendlier interface.