Meta Seizes @Muse Handles From British Rock Band for AI Agent

Meta's newly launched Muse AI agent now controls the @Muse handles on Instagram and X, displacing the English rock band that trademarked the name in 1999 and has been pushed to @museband on both platforms. Engadget reported that the Instagram handle changed sometime between early June and July 2026, well before Meta officially unveiled the agent on Tuesday.

The transfer surfaced awkwardly. When Mark Zuckerberg posted about the AI agent, his posts appear to have tagged the band's account by mistake, which a New York Times reporter called "the best bug in twitter history."

Meta has not publicly explained how any of this works. On earlier handle takeovers the company has offered only that "We allow people to change their usernames on Instagram." Neither Meta nor representatives for the band have commented on the current situation.

The pattern is not new. Meta acquired the @Meta Instagram handle from a motorcycle magazine after renaming the company in 2021, and picked up @threads from American Threads, a fashion retailer, when it launched the Threads app in 2023. This particular reassignment lands during a busy stretch of Meta AI news on our tracker, which logged the Muse agent's debut two days earlier as part of an ongoing run of Meta coverage.

The band's discography has long dwelled on, as coverage of the takeover put it, "fears and anxieties surrounding technology and how it might be used for social oppression."