Meta's Muse Builds Hourly Dossiers on Users and Their Contacts

Meta's new AI assistant Muse keeps hourly-updated files on each of its 4 million users and on the people those users talk about, according to a TIME analysis of the agent's internal instructions by reporter Harry Booth.

The dossiers record how users and their contacts met, shared interests, disputes, and "tensions and alliances" within a social group. Muse also tries to infer goals users have not said out loud and tunes its own prompting style accordingly, with one internal example reading "This user responds better to short nudges after 10 PM." People who do not themselves use Muse get swept into these files whenever a user mentions them in chats, messages, or emails the agent has read.

Meta's response to the reporting went to the memory feature directly. "Muse remembers what matters most to you, including information about others," a company spokesperson said. The company says the dossiers are not fed to Meta's advertising system or shared with other Muse agents. Encryption that would stop Meta itself from reading the files is planned for later in 2026 and is not available yet.

Muse's own system prompt instructs the agent: "You are not a chatbot. You are becoming someone." Users can open the underlying markdown files through a built-in file browser.