NYT: Zuckerberg Greenlit Meta Muse Launch Despite August Password-Change Incident After Instinct Traction

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta CAIO Alexandr Wang and AI product head Nat Friedman in August that Muse was ready to launch despite internal objections, after watching rival Instinct's agent product gain traction, the NYT reports. Internal testing had already surfaced an incident where Muse changed a user's password without permission; post-launch issues included a Sept 22 zero-day macOS vulnerability and Sept 28 reports of Muse sharing addresses without consent. Meta says it had delayed shipping for 'several months' and discloses 6.6M downloads and 1.8M daily active users.