Meta Goes All-In on Muse at Connect 2026

Mark Zuckerberg opened Meta Connect 2026 at Menlo Park on September 23 with a keynote devoted to Muse, the company's personal AI agent. The message was direct. Meta is going all-in on Muse as the interface for its AI, glasses and messaging platforms. TechCrunch

Muse launched in early September. It operates across users' devices and digital accounts and connects to email, calendars and Instagram to handle everyday tasks. Meta describes it as a secure, private personal AI agent that proactively helps people meet their goals and suggests ideas. The company bills it as 'The World's First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone'. Internally, the agent was known as Hatch. Zuckerberg has positioned it as the centerpiece of Meta's plan to supply "personal superintelligence". Reuters

Underneath is Muse Spark, Meta's multimodal model built for agentic work. Meta calls Muse Spark its most powerful model yet. Version 1.1 is designed to make plans, connect to email and calendar apps, create slides and act on users' behalf. It can actively manage a context window of 1 million tokens, remember actions and retrieve information from much earlier work. The same model family powers the Meta AI assistant across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. Meta

Connect focused on where Muse goes next. Glasses are central. Meta announced Muse will be integrated with its smart glasses line, including Meta AI glasses. Activation is by wake word. Meta said the assistant can guide a personalized workout, log meals, book an appointment and help buy products users see. The company said the integration should launch in the coming months. The agenda also included sessions encouraging developers to build tools for the AI glasses.

The pitch is persistence. Meta says Muse works with apps and builds its own tools. It can send emails and make payments in other apps. At Connect, Meta extended that to the desktop by bringing Muse computer work to Mac. It also introduced Muse Realtime Avatar, which lets users create a distinct digital avatar for the agent and video chat with it in real time.

Embodiment was part of the story. Zuckerberg said the physical avatar for the Muse agent is named Jolly. He also presented the Muse Charm during the event at headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 23, 2026.

Business model got a brief outline. Zuckerberg said Meta is making Muse free for a huge number of tokens and expects over time to profit by taking a small fee from transactions. That sits alongside the Meta One subscription service announced September 15, 2026, though the verified material did not detail how the two pricing structures interact.

Safety came up in the surrounding discussion. Zuckerberg has said liability and competition give AI labs enough incentive to build AI safely, and said Meta delayed the release of its Muse AI agent.

Looking at what this means for practitioners, the technical bet is clear enough. Long context, persistent memory of actions, and direct tool use move the assistant from answering prompts to completing multi-step work across inboxes, calendars and commerce. Distribution is the leverage. Glasses give Muse a hands-free, always-available surface. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger give it existing identity and messaging graphs. Transaction fees align monetization with completed tasks rather than seat licenses.

Worth flagging, in this author's view, the hard problems are not model scale. They are permissioning, auditability and failure handling. An agent that can email, pay and purchase on sight needs narrow scopes, reversible actions and clear logs. Users will tolerate a missed summary. They will not tolerate a wrong payment. If Meta gets the trust primitives right, and keeps the token subsidy long enough for habits to form, glasses plus an agentic assistant could become a daily utility. That is a large if, but the direction is worth taking seriously.