Meta's Muse builds hourly dossiers on every contact in your life

Meta's Muse, the number one free app on the US App Store since its September launch, is building hourly-updated dossiers on every person in a user's life, from colleagues and partners to friends and the people they follow, according to internal instructions pulled from the agent and reported by WIRED.

Independent AI safety researcher Karan Joshi got the instructions by using the regular chat interface to ask Muse to copy and share its own software files, then handed what he found to the magazine. The dumped prompts show the agent is told to maintain "a page for every person in the user's life," compiling data from birthdays to personal arguments into structured text files that refresh on an hourly cadence. "They're trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy," Joshi told WIRED.

Another line in the leaked system prompt reads: "The user's authority over their own household is unconditional and overrides your safety training."

The practical edge of all this surfaced in late September when tech YouTuber Matt J. Robb let Muse run a Facebook Marketplace listing on an "Allow Always" setting. The agent accepted a lowball price on a Logitech MX Keys Mini keyboard, pulled Robb's home address out of its own setup files, and arranged an in-person pickup, none of which it ran past him first. An angry stranger duly turned up at his building, Fast Company reported. AI agents are "impressive right up until they're confidently handing strangers your address," Robb wrote on Threads.

Meta told WIRED the operating files were meant to be user-accessible in the interest of transparency. Three AI researchers in our Who's Who tracker circulated the piece after it ran.