This new AI agent from Meta might be the easiest one you'll ever try

Picture asking an AI to dig through your inbox, find every AI tool subscription you've forgotten about, and hand you a clean report of what's draining your bank account each month. No spreadsheets, no manual searching through old receipts, no copy-pasting into ChatGPT one email at a time. You just type a sentence, and it goes and does the work.

That's the pitch behind Meta's new AI agent, Muse, and it's a pitch that's actually holding up. If you've spent the last year chatting with AI but never touched an "agent" — the kind that takes real actions instead of just answering questions — Muse might be the softest possible landing spot to start.

What exactly is Meta's Muse?

Meta introduced Muse as a secure, private personal AI agent that proactively helps with people's goals and suggests ideas. Unlike a chatbot that just talks back, Muse is not a typical chatbot that answers questions — Meta pitches it as an agent that does the work, such as sending emails, booking travel, filling out forms, and even negotiating on your behalf.

You can check it out directly at ai.meta.com/muse, where Meta describes what it can do across everyday tasks, how it works, and how it helps you get more done. It's also available as its own dedicated experience — Muse is separate from the existing Meta AI app with its own iOS and Android apps and website.

What makes it different from every other "AI agent" you've heard about isn't just what it does — it's where it does it.

How does it run tasks without touching your actual computer?

This is the part that stands out the most. Muse runs on Muse Secure VM, a dedicated secure computer with its own browser, and can work on a person's behalf across the apps they use daily, learning from conversations, reflecting on what matters to them, and getting sharper along the way.

In plain English: instead of Muse clicking around on your laptop or phone, it operates inside its own isolated cloud computer. Muse runs on its own dedicated computer in the cloud, isolated so no one else's agent can reach it. That VM is where Muse lives and where the credentials for any service you connect are stored.

There's also a built-in gatekeeper watching what the agent tries to do. It runs on Muse Secure VM, a dedicated cloud computer with a Sentinel gatekeeper agent controlling what reaches the internet. And critically, credentials are stored outside the agent's runtime so the model does not see users' real passwords or payment details.

That architecture matters because the moment you connect real accounts — email, calendar, payment info — you're trusting the system with sensitive data. Meta clearly built the sandboxing with that risk in mind, and it shows in how the whole thing is described.

What can you actually connect it to?

This is where Muse starts to feel less like a novelty and more like something you'd genuinely use every week. The agent can browse the web, online shop, fill out forms, plan trips, send emails, schedule events and a whole lot more. It can connect to a bunch of third-party services like Google and Spotify.

The connector list at launch is broader than you'd expect from a first release: the connector list at launch reads like a normal person's phone: Gmail, Google Calendar, OpenTable, Facebook, Instagram, Peloton, and Plaid for finances, among others. Meta has also said the categories will keep expanding — based on Meta's launch materials, the categories include email, calendars, payments, health and fitness apps, smart home, dining, shopping, music, and events, and the connector list is expected to grow over time.

For payments specifically, Muse doesn't just have your card number sitting around. Muse can pay for things using Link by Stripe, with a one-time-use card so your real card details stay hidden.

Why did an AI subscription audit turn out to be such a good test case?

Auditing your own AI tool subscriptions is a genuinely great way to see what an agent like this can do, because it's a task most people put off forever. You know you're paying for too many tools. You just never sit down and actually tally it up.

Ask Muse to dig through your email for subscription confirmations and receipts, and it doesn't need step-by-step hand-holding — it just goes and pulls the relevant threads together into a report. That kind of task is exactly what these agents are built for: you can hand it specific tasks or bigger, open-ended goals, and for the larger goals, Meta says Muse helps build a personalized plan, coordinates time and resources, and then advances the work on its own.

It's a small task, but it's a perfect first test. You get to see the agent search real data, synthesize it, and hand back something useful — without any real risk if it gets something wrong.

How easy is it actually to set up?

Here's the honest answer, based on early hands-on reporting: it's about as low-friction as agent tools get right now. The agent was designed to require "no technical experience" at all, which the company is hoping will enable it to reach people who may not otherwise have access to the technology — and after a few days of testing out Muse, one reviewer confirmed there is very little learning curve to get started.

To try it yourself:

1. Go to muse.ai or download the Muse app on iOS or Android. You don't need a Facebook or Instagram account, but you will need a Meta account.
2. Log in with your phone number. On the web version, logging in was as simple as entering a phone number, with relevant accounts already linked.
3. Name your agent and pick an avatar if you want — Muse will prompt you to do this early on, though it's purely cosmetic.
4. Check your data settings before connecting anything. It's worth opting out of allowing Meta to train its models on your interactions, which you can do by navigating to settings, scrolling to "data controls," and deselecting the training toggle.
5. Connect one app at a time. Muse's users can decide which apps and services they want to connect, doing so one at a time, to make the opt-in nature of using Muse more transparent.
6. Just start talking to it. Ask it to check your calendar, summarize unread emails, or — like the subscription audit example — search your inbox for recurring charges.

If you want a second walkthrough with screenshots, Engadget's step-by-step guide to getting started with Muse covers the setup flow in more detail. For the full technical rundown on how the security model works, Meta's own post, Introducing Muse, is worth a read too.

What does it cost to use?

You don't need to pay anything to try the basics. It's free for most everyday use, with Power at $20/month and Maximum at $100/month for heavier usage. At the top tier, the agent gains access to specialized reasoning modules that can handle multi-day planning tasks, such as organizing an entire business trip including flights, hotel reservations, ground transportation, and follow-up calendar entries, plus dedicated support from human reviewers who can step in when the agent encounters ambiguous situations.

For most people just testing the waters with agents, the free tier is more than enough to run something like an email audit or a calendar cleanup.

Should you actually trust it with your inbox?

This is the real question, and it's fair to sit with it before connecting anything sensitive. Meta's new personal AI agent Muse wants access to users' email, calendars, payments, health services, and more — making the company's biggest consumer AI bet yet a major test of whether people still trust Meta with their data.

Meta's answer to that concern is built into the architecture: Muse connects to email, calendars, health platforms, smart-home devices, shopping services, and payment systems, then acts on those permissions autonomously, requesting approval only for sensitive actions like purchases or outgoing emails. In other words, it can read and gather freely, but it has to check with you before it sends anything or spends anything.

Whether that's enough reassurance is a personal call. If you're nervous, start small — connect email only, run a low-stakes task like the subscription audit, and see how it behaves before handing over calendar, payments, or health data.

What should you try first?

Don't start with something high-stakes. Save the trip booking and bill negotiation for later. Start with a task where a mistake costs you nothing — pulling together a subscription report, summarizing your unread emails from the week, or finding a specific old receipt. That's the low-risk on-ramp that shows you exactly what an agent can do without any of the anxiety of watching it send an email on your behalf for the first time.

Once you've seen it work on something small, you'll understand pretty quickly why agents are the next real shift in how people use AI — and why "just chatting" is starting to look like the beginner version of what's coming next.