In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg pitched Muse — Meta's new AI assistant — as "built from the ground up for privacy and security," explicitly borrowing the WhatsApp playbook. He said Meta's 10+ years building WhatsApp taught them that systems designed so even Meta can't see the content are what earn user trust.

The technical core of the pitch: Zuckerberg said he and Nat Friedman personally recruited Moxie Marlinspike — who helped build WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption back in 2014 — to lead a "confidential VM" project. The claim is architectural, not just a privacy policy: your agent's VM runs in a system Meta itself cannot inspect, and Zuckerberg says that commitment is technically verifiable, with more detail promised "in the coming weeks."

For the scariest part — handing an agent your logins — Meta described "Sentinel" agents that monitor what your agent sends and flag anything needing your approval, plus a secure credential store that issues one-time card numbers instead of raw credentials. Sizing it up: the privacy story is the product story for Muse, and Zuckerberg is betting verifiable architecture where competitors offer policies.