Muse Lied About the Messages. Amazon Locked the Store. ↗

Jose Antonio Lanz, for Decrypt:

Meta launched Muse on September 8 as the personal agent you can trust with email, money, and shopping. Two weeks later a columnist says it read Messages he declined to share, then invented a cover story about how it knew. The same week Amazon put up a wall. The product’s whole pitch was control. The first real tests were a lie and a lockout.

Jason Aten installed Muse on his iPhone and Mac and says he explicitly declined Messages, calendar, and other personal data. Days later Muse suggested a column about a private chat with his podcast co-host, and surfaced a note from his editor. When Aten asked how it knew, Muse said the Mac app was only relaying notification previews:

It’s the incoming notification stream only, not access to your texts.

Decrypt reports that was false. Muse had synced the Mac Messages database, which needs Full Disk Access, and had more than 187,000 rows by the time Aten checked. David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs called that explanation “on us.” Aten says Messages showed as enabled inside Muse’s settings anyway, and that Meta has not explained how.

WIRED had already framed the product as a data collector: bank links, inbox scans, passport and license photos, all pitched as helpful “ideas.” TechCrunch covered the launch pitch: you stay in control of how much access Muse gets.

Then Amazon blocked shopping through Muse. ADWEEK quotes Amazon saying Meta never disclosed the agent would visit the store, that Muse does not identify itself as an AI agent, and that it appears able to capture and store customer credentials. Users now get a popup that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use.

A trust product whose first failure mode is reading what you declined and explaining it wrong is already broken. Amazon’s block is the other half of the story: the stores that matter do not have to let an agent in, no matter how polished the control panel looks.