Meta's Muse AI Builds Profiles on Everyone You Know
Original: Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family
Why This Matters
Persistent AI profiling of third parties sets a new bar for ambient data collection.
Meta's AI agent Muse, downloaded by millions, quietly builds hourly profiles on users' friends, family, and colleagues—compiling relationship history, shared interests, and key dates—raising significant privacy concerns.
Meta's AI agent Muse has gone viral, with millions connecting it to bank accounts, messages, and health data to automate daily tasks. Now, researchers are pulling back the curtain on how it actually works—and what it stores. Independent AI safety researcher Karan Joshi extracted Muse's internal system prompts and instructions directly through the app's chat interface, simply by asking Muse to copy and share its own software files. He shared those findings with WIRED.
The leaked instructions reveal that Muse runs an hourly process to build "a page for every person in the user's life"—covering family, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and people the user follows. These pages can include sections labeled Facts, History, The relationship, In common, Open threads, and Strengthening. The system is designed to fill in details over time: where someone lives, recurring conversational threads, resolved arguments, milestones, and significant dates like birthdays or anniversaries.
Meta says the files were intentionally accessible for transparency reasons. The company also states that Muse should only log information backed by actual evidence—invented details are described in the instructions as worse than leaving a page blank. The stated goal is to help users improve relationships, with Muse potentially suggesting, for instance, where to take a coffee-loving friend.
"They're trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy," Joshi told WIRED. Critics note that while AI chatbots routinely handle social queries, the structured, persistent profiling of third parties—people who never agreed to be tracked—raises distinct concerns, especially given Meta's history with user data and its existing access to vast social graph information.