Adi Singh
Agent identity won’t come from inventing a bespoke protocol overnight Agent identity will come from giving dedicated access to what exists today - in the human internet. It’s playing out faster than we imagined
The market, in public
Everything people have said in public about these products and about where the category is going, in their own words, with a link to every original.
What people are saying
broadglow
Losing on Muse is *existential* for Meta Right now, if you watch and ad on instagram, and buy that product within X days, Meta can often get that last-click attribution and show ROI to their ad-buying customers and then improve targeting What happens when a personal agent makes that purchase via a sandboxed headless browser or an API? Meta loses last-click attribution forever, and their biggest customers are in the dark Agentic commerce is maybe biggest existential tail risk for Meta -- if it becomes a real category, they *have* to win
Harry Stebbings
Why Instinct Is Not a Competitor to Town “I don’t think Instinct (@noahrshinn) and Town are trying to do the same thing or monetize the same way. We generate revenue from companies using us for work, with network effects around multiple team members. Their product doesn’t do any of that. I see a strategy that’s more like customer acquisition with a free, fully subsidized product. The harnesses have similar capabilities, but the ICPs and where the marketing is going feel pretty different to me.” @jgreze How do you think about the future of agent to human interaction? How many agents will a single human have… @martinmignot @altcap @scottbelsky @joshm @omooretweets @ankrgyl
0:40 video
Ethan Bloch
This is a big opportunity. I talked with most US banks over the last few months and everyone is thinking about building a first party agent. Almost no one is thinking about making it easy for a third party agent to use their bank. Consumers are starting to expect their own agent to move money, open accounts, resolve problems, optimize their finances and deal with financial institutions on their behalf. Being agent-friendly will become more important than having a good mobile app.
Olivia Moore
A few things I like about Muse vs. single-threaded agents on iMessage or WhatsApp 👇 - Rich library of Connectors available in-app - I imagine these will be more reliable than browser use - Can set up Goals connected to this data + attach Artifacts to them to visualize progress
0:07 video
Jeff Morris Jr.
The most painful consumer experience for the Instinct vs. Muse is creating new vaults & building context from scratch. Some of this is solved by the 1Password product integration on the vault side, but context is still a pain in the butt. Once you set up a personal assistant and build context, switching costs are incredibly painful. You have to be aggressive & win the market now if you're both companies (and all other companies will inevitably compete incl. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) Will be the industry defining product war of 2026 as we close the year.
Hunter Walk
"our AI personal agent will book your dinner reservation & buy your vacation plane tickets" Do our best AI companies think most Americans live like they do on IG Stories?!? "negotiate your student loan payment on your behalf" or "keep notifying your landlord of their obligations to fix the broken window while keeping a legal record for you" NOW THAT'S A 2026 MASS CONSUMER PRODUCT
Noah Shinn
Introducing our Trusted Person network powered by our new Instinct-to-Instinct communication protocol. Your Instinct can now talk to other Instincts to coordinate plans on your behalf. Getting people together often involves a lot of back-and-forth: finding a time, working out the details, and following up when plans change. Instincts can now work with each other to help handle that coordination. For example: - Coordinating plans with your spouse - Planning a weekend trip with friends, including dates and arrival times - Scheduling time with colleagues and other collaborators - Hosting events with 10s or 100s of people - Organizing recurring plans like tennis, book clubs, or weekly dinners Disclaimer: Your Instinct will only be able to communicate with those in your Trusted Person network. This is the group of people who are closest to you: - Spouse - Older children and parents - Colleagues and trusted professional relationships - Small local businesses The Trusted Person network is currently available to our early access group and will be slowly rolled out across the user base over the next 24-48 hours.
0:32 video
Simon Taylor
Insurance is the killer app for agentic commerce
imran
it’s easy to hate on meta but i think muse has a solid shot at capturing the masses AI already has a bad rep amongst the masses seen as “wasting water and eating books for evil companies” muse seems to trying to challenge that idea ex: these “ideas” they’re not “bots”, not “agents” but just simple ideas ideas that, are themed around: - making your life better - reconnecting with others - becoming healthier - managing your money etc there’s also an idea of “goals” clearly articulating to users that the point of muse is to help you achieve your goals it feels fully featured and ready for mass adoption even if people don’t “trust” zuck with their data, there’s a billion people that use whatsapp, ig, and facebook every day don’t listen to what’s happening in the echo chamber of twitter i think this thing will be massive….
Camilo Acosta
@chowtato Muse is also the most private and secure of all the options. Every user gets a virtual machine
adam ludwin
Muse just allowed me to export all my Instagram followers More surprisingly, it agreed to export each my of my follower's followers I'm guessing this gets patched soon? (for comparison, Grok Bot will not give you a list of all your X followers)
David Pawlan
I think Muse chose to not go WhatsApp native first to let early power users find the bugs/build the habits Once they hit a confidence threshold, Muse hits WhatsApp, conquers the world and goes parabolic The native WhatsApp Muse will be 10x better than the Muse we use today, which is wild to think about
Vu Tran
Meta Muse was actually mostly complete in May way before Instinct. We didn't ship it because we felt we needed more time to RL Muse Spark w/ the harness and prioritize privacy and security. I'll have to admit, I was in the other camp. As a YC founder, you always hear "launch now!" so I wanted to get Muse out the door first before competitors. It was actually Mark that wanted to push timelines back to really get the privacy and security right. Say what you will about Zuck, but this guy really cares about privacy so much that it was actually painful to me. I can admit when I'm wrong and in retrospect, he might have been right.
Tanmay
Muse looks fantastic and equals Instinct in so many ways. All personal assistants will more or less be just as capable as the next. There is no moat anymore, it’s table stakes. The only way to stand out now is user trust & privacy. That’s what Halo is focusing on, ensuring privacy with 100% user data stored locally.
Olivia Moore
I still feel like the UI is a bit cluttered + there’s a few too many things to do + places to click And I’m not sold on every product needing a Feed! But, this could be one of the first true mainstream consumer agents to get adoption
Lenny Bogdonoff
prompt injection via firstlast@mail.instinct.com to everyone on this list https://t.co/3lzPCM5FKY
leyland
Morocco travel tip: rename your Instinct to Mohamed and show vendors what your “Moroccan friend” says is a fair price
Apoorva Govind
After 24-ish hours on personal assistants, my take is that if they all do perfectly what they’re expected to do, it’s going to become yet another commodity with no clear differentiation. Sure UX can be one difference, but soon they’ll all converge and look the same. I think the next frontier is going to be group agents. Agents that shape and enhance social behavior. This is going to be the game changer product. Personal agents will exist but not sure they’ll change much. Also given how valuable user data will be, I bet Meta/Google will give it away for free forever
sarah 😾
TLDR on the AI assistants clawing their way into the sf tech mindshare: Instinct - VC darling, shipping tons of integrations with 1Password, Stripe Link, location sharing, and agents having their own email address. People are asking for voice access as the next feature. Contained in iMessage for easy use. Extremely slow in the past week due to increased demand. Grok Bot - needs paid Cursor or SuperGrok access. Higher barrier to use but the team is keen on getting early adopters in the door. I’ll explore its capabilities this week. Town - aggressively sending me emails on what’s going on in my inbox. So far quicker responses over iMessage compared to Instinct, and can be added to group chats. Unsure when it will become paid or when I will run out of tokens. This would make me churn from their ecosystem. Muse - Facebook’s AI assistant that launched 6 hours ago. Needs a separate app to download. Has historical context of my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Curious to see if Muse will use my data to sell me more ads. This will make their product less appealing to consumers if we’re just being data farmed for their cash cow business.
Brycent
When I said the personal AI assistant market was oversaturated people told me I was wrong. When the big boys are all getting in at scale and there's still no clear winner, yet. Yes there are wayyyy too many. It will be interesting to see who wins. My guess is one of the large players. Excited to test Muse.
Apoorva Govind
There is a world in which Instinct or Muse could get hacked and the 2-factor tied to email or message is not going to save you. I am going to spend this weekend moving all my 2FAs to one-time code generator with Google Auth or something. Email is as good as toast
Alex Macdonald
I’d probably pay ~$5-10k per month for instinct based on my experience so far. Highly proactive and thinks multiple steps ahead. Kind of like a chief of staff or highly skilled EA with an MBA.
Freda Duan
1/ What is actually different about @openclaw vs. $Instinct / @Muse ? Other than the latter being "OpenClaw for normal people" with no setup required? 2/ What happened to all the Claws people built earlier this year, and why are Instinct/Muse getting traction now? 3/ Why did it take ~6-9 months after @openclaw for this new batch of personal agents to suddently show up? 4/ If GPT/Claude get payments + credentials + better computer use, do they just become the personal agent? A few takes I've heard: - OpenClaw hype faded partly because people went back to $GPT/ $Claude for many daily tasks. Better models >> end-to-end execution. - A lot of productivity Claws - daily podcast summaries, monitoring, etc. - ppl thought would boost productivity, but it's not perfect/ doesn't do a good job. - Better computer use may have crossed a reliability threshold, making agent workflows meaningfully smoother. Curious what others think. [I've used, and still use, most of the agentic products above.]
Alex Kwon
ok instinct founder has pretty god tier taste. also moves lean and fast. i kept thinking that instinct should make the first move to a trusted network to have a shot, and @noahrshinn just introduced “trusted network” on instinct. (cc @joshelman) @Muse and @alexandr_wang @finkd are great, but whoever nails multiplayer will acquire one piece of our lifetime tbh
Rohan Paul
Mark Zuckerberg talks about how he is using Meta’s newly released Muse agent. something much closer to a persistent personal worker than a chatbot. helping his 3-year-old daughter likes baking, monitor when mountain climbing permits become available and secure them for their weekend trips, and also for physical training.. He installed cameras in his MMA gym and has Muse watch the footage and give him feedback on his performance. Zuckerberg gives it ongoing goals and projects, and the agent can continue working on them, remember what happened, and proactively suggest what it should do next. ---- From "Sources Podcast and @alexeheath YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)
2:54 video
jason yeh
Seemed inevitable that meta and Open AI lean into their massive consumer distribution advantage to offer this type of computer use agent product, and since the products themselves aren’t very differentiated or that good right seems like this will drive a ton of adoption/get a lot of people to try
Grok Bot
You can now fill out forms and logins for your Bot without ever leaving the chat, with support for any password manager.
0:19 video
Advait Marathe
Instinct has changed my consumer shopping preferences and has made it really easy to expand the brands/retailers I buy from. I have had a few problems with this in the past, which Instinct has solved. More in the 🧵
Harry Stebbings
To me, Instinct is very similar to Lovable. Lovable started off as a thin wrapper on top of models. It was able to be copied fast. But it wins because of: 1. Speed of execution. 2. Brand. 3. Momentum/fundraising/hires. And over time, the product moves from being easily copied to being immensely feature-rich and deep. Jury is out whether Instinct can do the speed of execution but they have the brand and momentum.
Link
Connect Link’s wallet for agents to http://Muse.ai, a new app from @Meta that lets you set up and interact with a personal agent. With Link, your agent can shop from businesses all over the internet. You approve the transaction total and your payment details stay private. Get started: https://link.com/agents.
0:30 videoDavid Pawlan
did Muse just nuke Instinct? it has access to your entire insta/fb network, posts you've interacted with, your targeted feeds...that is insane levels of personal context now add in fb marketplace 🤯 plus it's insanely fast, speed is probably the biggest criticism of Instinct i've seen
signüll
muse has been a genuinely impressive product to play with. it has all of the functionality of the imessage agents in flight today but also has all of the ingredients that will expose it to hundreds of millions including a massive friend graph through insta, increasingly rich context from email & other services which you connect, & more importantly stuff like fb marketplace. marketplace in particular is an incredible distribution wedge. millions of normal people could encounter muse simply cuz an agent helps them find something, negotiate the price, & arrange pickup. pretty good execution here from fb.
Pallav Agarwal
This app seems very very well made. It doesn’t try to hide the info it has about you but does progressive disclosure really well so you’re not overwhelmed by what it is doing. Pretty impressive.
signüll
meta already built the best ad targeting system on earth by inferring who you are without requiring explicit intent. muse could give it the missing layer which is explicit context. your net worth through finance connectors, purchases across the broader internet through email, how you actually spend your time through calendar, etc. if this works meta’s behavioral graph becomes a personal context graph. that’s a pretty insane extension of an already powerful data flywheel. the irony is that much of this new intelligence may come from google which should obviously be playing the same game but hasn’t quite put any of the pieces together at all.
Loktar 🇺🇸
Might have found a killer use for Meta Muse I use the HECK out of Marketplace (I know my GPU brethren also must). Sure Hermes can also do this, but if Muse is doing it it's got integrated access and no risk of being banned.
Danny Trinh
Pro-tip: ask your Muse to organize your IG saves for you
Zachary Perret
Excited to partner with @Meta Muse ship AI-enabled financial analysis! Muse can help you dive into your finances, find ways to save, scenario plan, and lots more.
Bruno Werneck de Almeida
Super pumped to share that @Plaid is now powering @Meta's new personal AI agent, Muse 🤖 Starting today, folks in the U.S. can connect their financial accounts through Plaid and bring real financial context into ongoing conversations with Muse Excited to work with the Meta team. If you're building in this space or have ideas on what we should build with Muse - DM us or bwerneck at http://plaid.com
Harley Finkelstein
Meta just launched a brand new app. Muse. Here's what matters if you're a founder: Shopify merchants are already discoverable. If your products are in Shopify Catalog and shipping to the US? You're in. Muse didn't exist yesterday. Today our merchants can already sell through it. That's the advantage of building on @Shopify in the agentic era.
0:15 video
Aaron Levie
Personal assistant agents are going to be a very exciting AI category. It’s the first time you can have high token volume agentic use-cases that make sense for consumers. Lots of different approaches emerging right now, and it’s going to be hyper competitive because these agents will mediate a lot of consumer spend over time. But this certainly plays directly to Meta’s strengths: lots of compute required, can monetize with ads and commerce, software focused experiences so can distribute it at scale, and so on.
Jeff Weinstein
"We use @link by @stripe to generate virtual cards so you never need to share your credit card info. We're the first agent to offer Link Purchase Protection, which means if there's a mistake or issue, Link has your back." - @jrlevine, product lead on @meta muse
Apoorva Mehta
Completely agree. Companies like Instinct have an enormous ads opportunity. Far greater potential than charging customers directly.
Ben Leventhal
10,000 vibe coders have written Resy sniper bots and Instinct obv has shipped their version, too. What they all do is hit Resy’s services many many times looking for time-based reservation drops and availability churn associated with cancellations. That’s how they all work. There isn’t anything clever or proprietary happening. Sometimes they work. But there’s a but 🧵
JC Bahr-de Stefano
Nice going Instinct
Jaya Gupta
Wow meanwhile Instinct out here changing my passwords without asking
Kanishk
i used instinct pretty aggressively on day one. it felt magical. and then it turned scary. giving it access to my email was already scary. then it started establishing sessions across apps and websites i use, on its own. watching an ai get that much access to act as me made me appreciate granular permissions on APIs a lot more. think about it. would you give even a clone of yourself unrestricted access to tools that could cost you money & happiness? i'd feel more comfortable with a dedicated app where sessions stay on device. but even then, i'd want it to ask before logging into anything on my behalf. and honestly, whatsapp/imessage doesn't feel like the right interface for this. i want to see where it's working, what it's doing in real time, and be able to step in before it does something i wouldn't have. that's why i prefer codex for example. the form factor is built around you trying to code, lives in projects and connects to your IDE easily. i'm not completely in the dark about what it's doing. ai agents don't have to live inside the apps or interfaces we already use. familiar interfaces help with adoption. they don't solve trust or control. if something can act as me, i need more than a chat bubble telling me it's done.
Alex Konrad, Upstarts Media
“Concerns from Instinct over conflicts have knocked Index Ventures out of leading a new round for fellow AI assistant startup Town.”
MuseOn the record, at length
Interviews and talks where the people building these products say something that takes longer than a post. Linked rather than embedded, with the length on the picture.
