Meta’s Muse turns AI shopping into a checkout with major retail partners

Meta wants its AI to do more than tell you which sneakers are on sale. It wants the AI to buy them. On September 23, Meta announced retail partnerships for Muse, its standalone personal AI agent app, with Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair and Best Buy. The deals arrived barely two weeks after launch. The move turns Muse from a chatbot that answers questions into something closer to a personal shopper with a payment method on file. That shift matters because it points to how Meta plans to make money from the product. What Muse actually does Meta unveiled Muse on September 8, 2026, pitching it as an agent built to carry out multi-step tasks. A typical chatbot hands you a list of links. An agent clicks through them for you. Shopping quickly emerged as one of the app’s main use cases. Users can have Muse browse retail sites, surface product recommendations and complete the purchase. Meta requires user approval before Muse handles a transaction, so the agent can fill the cart but cannot swipe the card without permission. The app runs tasks inside a dedicated environment Meta calls the Muse Secure VM. A virtual machine is essentially a walled-off computer within a computer, so the agent’s b...