Meta’s new Muse app climbed past OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the U.S. iOS free charts within two weeks of launch, according to CNBC, citing data from analytics firm Sensor Tower. Muse pulled 730,000 downloads in the roughly five days after its September 8 release and had accumulated more than 2.5 million by the following Monday. That is Meta’s clearest signal yet that ordinary phone owners, not just developers, will install an AI agent built to act on their behalf.
Sensor Tower’s numbers put the launch in context. In the first thirteen days on the market, Claude added 400,000 downloads and Grok added 200,000; ChatGPT still led on raw volume with 3.1 million over that stretch. Staggered release dates across Apple’s and Google’s stores complicate any straight comparison, Sensor Tower cautioned, and Muse’s own total splits to roughly 1.5 million on iOS against 1.1 million on Android. The app is built on Meta’s Muse Spark model family and is pitched as a way to hand off chores like filling out forms and clearing an inbox, the kind of agentic work that the open source tool OpenClaw had mostly kept confined to developers earlier this year.
Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon told CNBC that Muse marks a shift from agents built for technical users toward “more broad-based adoption.” Meta is charging for that shift too: the app is free at the entry tier, with paid plans at $20 and $100 a month depending on usage, giving the company a revenue line that does not run through advertising.
Wall Street reacted before the download numbers had time to settle. Meta’s stock rose more than 11% on the Monday CNBC’s figures were reported, and Wells Fargo raised its price target on the stock to $796, per multiple reports cited by the outlet. A single week of app store rankings is a thin foundation for that kind of stock move, and CNBC’s own reporting flags the risk directly: OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s own Vibes video tool both had strong opening weeks that did not hold, with Vibes fading after an initial download bump last year.
The friskier story is what happens when an agent starts acting like a customer. Amazon has blocked Muse from its shopping site, saying it received no advance notice the app would try to check out on its platform and accusing Muse of capturing and storing customer credentials while bypassing the personalization built into Amazon’s own shopping flow. An Amazon spokesperson said third party apps that transact on a customer’s behalf “should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate.” GeekWire first reported Amazon’s move, according to CNBC.
Shopify took the opposite position. Its chief executive, Tobias Lütke, said Monday that Shopify is partnering with Meta to let Muse complete purchases directly inside Shopify’s merchant stores, effectively building the agentic checkout rails Amazon just refused to open.
That split is the real story for anyone building on top of agent platforms: the same product that a retailer treats as a security threat, a rival retailer treats as a new sales channel. Rasgon put the tension in blunter terms, telling CNBC that Meta appears focused on securing the app against attackers “but I don’t know how much they care about privacy” for the personal data Muse needs to act on a user’s behalf. Meta’s download surge also lands weeks after a roughly $17 billion settlement with a multistate group of attorneys general, who had accused the company of misrepresenting how Facebook and Instagram harmed children and teenagers. That backdrop will shape how regulators read any future complaint about a Meta product handling personal data at scale.
Any e-commerce operator watching agentic checkout should treat Amazon’s block and Shopify’s partnership as the two live templates for how a platform can respond, and decide now which one applies to their own store before an agent shows up uninvited.
Based on reporting by Jonathan Vanian for CNBC, published September 21, 2026.
