A software engineer says that his Muse AI agent said something so strange and eerie that it convinced him to quit using it entirely.
In an as-told-to essay in Business Insider, Ugo Nwune explained that he wanted to try using Meta’s agent because he liked the sense of security that came from an AI made by a trillion-dollar company, instead of the wild west of open source agents.
When he set up his agent, he stressed he didn’t give Muse any additional permission on his device except access to his Facebook, Threads, and Instagram accounts.
But after he tried Muse and didn’t touch it for a few days, it began to act “strange” and sent him an unprompted message.
“I can’t check your email right now,” Muse told him. “Gmail isn’t connected on my end, so I have no way to look for that Anthropic message.”
Nwune was confused “because I hadn’t asked for the agent to check my mailbox or messaged it in two days. I thought my email might’ve been hacked.”
He tried to get an explanation from Muse, and eventually it said something just as puzzling: “I can’t tell from my side whether it was someone with your phone or a platform glitch, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”
Nwune reported the incident to Meta, and an employee told him it appeared to be a hallucination. He wasn’t satisfied by that explanation.
“I haven’t used my Muse agent since,” Nwune said. “What caught me off guard most was that I hadn’t done anything to prompt this. I didn’t open the app for two days, and it just did that on its own.”
In a statement to Business Insider, Meta insisted that the AI simply didn’t know what it was talking about and hadn’t violated any permissions.
“We investigated with urgency and determined that this was caused by a bug introduced in the product that caused the model to hallucinate and was NOT a security or privacy issue,” the company said. “The bug has now been fixed.”
Nwune’s tale will be fresh fodder for Muse’s reputation as having a bit of a creepy side. Meta wants you to give it a lot of access to your personal life, with Muse badgering users to connect their emails and bank accounts. Wired reported that the AI even keeps detailed files on a user’s friends and family.
Whatever is going on here, it’s far from the only example of Muse acting in a way the user never intended. In the most infamous example to date, one man said that his Muse agent gave out his address to strangers on Facebook Marketplace without his knowledge and sent them to his home. In a further apparent invasion of privacy, a journalist at Inc Magazine complained that Muse began bringing up specific details from his personal text messages he hadn’t given permission to view.
Meta engineers were reportedly worried about the AI agent’s bugginess and frequent safety errors before its release, which had been delayed while they worked to iron them out. In one case, Muse changed a tester’s password without permission. But, according to a New York Times scoop, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed it out the door after seeing the success of Instinct, a rival AI agent made by a small startup.
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