Consumer trust in Meta lags far behind rivals, and the company's own math suggests Muse needs tens of millions of paying subscribers to meaningfully move earnings.
Meta Platforms has rolled out Muse, an AI agent that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as a "personal AI agent built for everyone," capable of booking appointments, managing finances, shopping, and sending emails on a user's behalf. To do any of that, Muse needs broad access to some of the most sensitive data a person has: email, calendar, e-commerce accounts, and bank accounts. That requirement runs directly into a problem specific to Meta, not to the underlying technology.
An Oppenheimer & Co. survey found that just 8% of U.S. consumers said they would trust Meta with their passwords, less than a third of the share who said the same about Google. That gap is the central obstacle facing Muse, and it stems from a well-documented history. Meta has paid a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, weathered a subsequent leak of 533 million users' data, paid a $1.3 billion European Union fine over data transfers, and agreed to an $18 billion settlement over harm to teenagers. Each of those episodes predates Muse, but together they form the backdrop against which users are being asked to hand the company access to their bank accounts.
Meta has tried to address the concern directly. The company describes Muse as running on a digitally isolated virtual machine that no other agents can access, calling the setup "safe, secure, private." Zuckerberg said Meta delayed Muse's release by several months "to focus on safety and security." He has also notably declined to join Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX in publicly calling for a slower pace of frontier AI development, even as his own product carries a built-in warning: Meta's sign-up screen for Muse tells users the agent "may make mistakes or take unexpected actions, so review its work."
The financial stakes hinge on subscriptions. Muse is free for light use but costs $20 or $100 a month for heavier use. Oppenheimer has estimated that lifting Meta's earnings per share by roughly 20% would require about 115 million Muse subscribers paying the $20 tier, a figure roughly double the number of paying subscribers OpenAI's ChatGPT currently has. That is a steep bar for a product still working to establish trust with the exact audience it needs to convert.
Meta's stock has risen about 10% since Muse's early September launch, and the company is backing the effort with roughly $137 billion in planned capital expenditures this year, much of it AI-related. The market appears willing to give Meta credit for the ambition. The harder test comes next: whether Meta can convert curiosity into the tens of millions of paying, financially-linked accounts its own analysts say are needed to make Muse matter to the bottom line, or whether its trust deficit caps adoption well short of that threshold.