When Meta first released its adorable Muse AI agents to the public, the company immediately faced a tidal wave of headlines, as major errors and glaring privacy issues bubbled to the surface.
It turns out that the decision to release Muse was far from unanimous. As recently reported by New York Times reveals that Agent Buggy was forced onto the market by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, even as he was rogue to the very people who built it.
According to the New York TimesMuse’s development cycle was plagued by worrying security errors that delayed its release for several months. It was only after the release of Instinct, a rival AI agent developed by a small startup, that Zuckerberg decided to pull the trigger in a bout of corporate FOMO.
As three anonymous insiders told the New York TimesThere was an instance during testing in which Muse changed a test user’s password without authorization. In another example, a Meta researcher named Summer Yue realized too late that her testing agent had taken control of her work computer and was mass deleting her emails.
“I couldn’t stop it from my phone,” Yue said in a post on X-formerly-Twitter. “I had to run around on my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”
These security concerns were still a priority in the days leading up to Muse’s debut, as engineers discovered a glaring security flaw allowing the AI bot to “break into” Meta’s own internal database, which staff feared could be exploited by hackers.
This is important, not only for the security of Meta, but also for the security of users. It turns out that Muse is designed to suck up gobs of data about its users, as well as friends and family in the user’s orbit.
Time will tell what other security issues resurface as more users entrust their lives to Meta’s animated AI toy. But with surveillance like this, the question is almost certainly when, not if.
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