Meta's Muse AI Agent Runs Tasks in WhatsApp Background

Meta introduced Muse this week, an AI agent that lives inside WhatsApp and works on tasks after a user closes the chat. Send it a request to book a flight or draft an email, and Muse keeps running in the background, checking in only when it needs approval or hits a snag. That's a departure from most chatbot agents, which stop the moment you leave the app.

Payment is where Muse gets more aggressive. Meta says the agent can complete purchases directly through Stripe's Link service, generating one-time cards for each transaction. That puts Meta in a spot OpenAI just vacated, since ChatGPT recently dropped its own direct payment feature. Muse also handles negotiation, not just execution, so Meta is pitching it as something that can haggle over a bill or push back on a price rather than simply filling out a form.

To make the case that this is safe territory for an assistant with browser access and payment info, Meta built Muse to run inside a virtual machine cut off from the rest of its systems, with a separate process watching what it does. The claims about what that isolation actually protects, and how it works, are worth a closer look.