The AI Wire ●

Daytona CEO Ivan Burazin shared an estimate, citing Kenneth Auchenberg's math, that Meta's Muse agent needs roughly 65,000 CPUs and 75 petabytes of DRAM — about $2.8 billion in infrastructure — to serve 100 million users. Scaled to Facebook's 3 billion-user footprint, the back-of-envelope figure reaches some $84 billion, more than Meta's entire 2025 capex.

The estimate landed hard in tech-exec circles: Box CEO Aaron Levie picked it up with the warning that "the compute needed for the stage of AI we're about to enter is going to be insane," and Elon Musk replied "People have no idea." It tracks with what is known — each Muse user gets a cloud VM with 8 GB of RAM for their agent — and with a separate report that Muse drove renewed server-CPU demand on AMD EPYC hardware after its September 8 launch.

Caveat: this is one executive's envelope math amplified by X, not a company disclosure. But it is the first concrete unit-economics number attached to Muse's free tier, and it reframes the agent race as an infrastructure-spend race — exactly the lens the labs themselves are starting to use.

Trump signed a voluntary AI safety agreement with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, SpaceXAI and Nvidia during a Tech Week luncheon in San Francisco. The 308-word agreement asks advanced AI labs to set up internal safety teams — described as almost a constitution for superintelligence — while the government moves $1 trillion into defense spending, with $13.5 billion earmarked for autonomous systems and AI.

Silicon Valley founders and investors cheered the White House's hands-off approach to AI regulation. At Tech Week, VCs and AI founders praised self-policing as the model for frontier AI oversight, with the pact framed as shared safety norms without hard rules.

Some safety researchers warned self-policing is not enough. David Robinson, who resigned from OpenAI's safety team, said self-policing is no substitute for hard law and that serious safety challenges lie ahead. The pact came a day before OpenAI fired three of its safety researchers — timing that raised concerns about whether safety work is being stifled.

ChatGPT hit 664 million mobile daily active users in September, up 7% from August and 69% year over year, according to Sensor Tower data cited by Bank of America analyst Justin Post. OpenAI said on September 29 that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users.

Google's Gemini reached 151 million mobile daily users, up 11% month over month and up 321% from last year. The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users in August.

Meta's new Muse agent app climbed to 1.96 million mobile daily users within weeks of its September 8 launch. For comparison, xAI's Grok sits at 2 million mobile daily users and Meta's own Meta AI app stands at 6 million.

Bank of America frames the numbers as part of a consumer shift away from plain chat toward autonomous, agentic systems that take actions on users' behalf.

At Wednesday's Windows and Surface event, Microsoft detailed new AI capabilities for Windows centered on Copilot: local file context, so agents can work with files on the device, and OS-wide actions. A new Windows Search experience brings thousands of actions directly to the taskbar — switching to dark mode, turning on Do Not Disturb, dimming the screen, arranging windows, sending a text message — and an opt-in integration with the new Copilot will surface quick answers inline. The new actions began rolling out to Windows Insiders on October 7.

On the developer side, agents already supporting Microsoft's containment model include OpenAI's Codex, GitHub Copilot, and LM Studio, with Anthropic Claude Code, Perplexity, and Manus planning support. Notably, Microsoft said Meta's Muse personal AI agent is coming soon as a native Windows app with integration. Microsoft Entra will soon distinguish agent activity from user activity in Microsoft Agent 365, with Intune policy support for managing agent process containers on Windows 11.

The push makes safety containment a central theme: Nadella pitched this as the 'birth of the next generation of Windows agentic platforms,' while acknowledging that proving AI agents can be safely contained on personal computers is one of the key challenges.

Meta updated its Muse personal AI agent app on October 7 to support iPad, nearly a month after the mobile app's initial release, The Verge reported. The new version is designed around the iPad's larger display and multitasking, and Apple's App Store listing now identifies Muse as compatible with both iPhone and iPad.

The update also adds a wave of new connectors for work tasks: Canva, Dropbox, Figma, QuickBooks, GitHub, Zoom, Asana, Klaviyo, Granola and Notion. The listing describes Muse as a personal agent that can manage email, calendars, reservations, budgets, shopping, health and fitness data, and linked social and business accounts, subject to user approval for each action.

The iPad release closes out the mobile footprint for Muse, which launched on iPhone, Android and the web on September 8 and in Canada on September 18. Windows remains the last major platform waiting — Meta and Microsoft have said a native Windows app with MXC integration is coming soon.

Google DeepMind, Meta and AI drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs will jointly invest $300 million in the Virtual Biology initiative led by the non-profit biomedical research organization Biohub, The Verge reported on October 7. The project marshals $1.8 billion in combined funding, data, and computing and measurement resources.

The central goal is a large-scale biological dataset that AI can train on, leading to virtual cell models that predict how cells respond to disease, drugs and other interventions — so researchers can run first-pass experiments digitally before the lab.

The US government is participating too: the Department of Energy will invest more than $500 million over five years in national-lab supercomputers and imaging technology, while NIH links and standardizes its biological datasets for AI training. Big-lab competition is heating up in biology, and this is the largest coordinated bet yet on AI-simulated cells.

Security company Cequence found traffic matching Meta's Muse agent at more than half of the customers it studied, within two weeks of Muse's September 8 launch — and most of those businesses would not have known. Muse presents itself as an ordinary Chrome browser rather than identifying as an AI agent, so to standard security checks it looks like a person browsing.

Cequence spotted the traffic through behavioral analysis, including a browser update that went from 0% to more than 90% of Muse traffic within days — a sign Meta hosts and updates these cloud browsers centrally. At the median customer, Muse traffic grew nearly sixfold within about two weeks of first appearing.

The finding landed alongside the launch of Cequence's Agent Trust capability, which verifies agents that present an identity and catches the ones that don't. With agentic browsers multiplying, the company argues businesses need both: stop out-of-bounds actions while still letting customers use their services through agents like Muse.

Senior executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta testified under oath at a rare Committee of the Whole session of the New York City Council on October 5, convened by Speaker Julie Menin to examine AI risks.

Anthropic sent Logan Graham, head of its Frontier Red Team; OpenAI sent policy development chief Morgan Dwyer; Google's Alice Friend and Meta's Shane Cahill appeared. All four companies agreed to appear only after the council threatened subpoenas.

Elon Musk's SpaceXAI was the lone no-show — the council says it is in direct violation of its subpoena and plans to pursue enforcement in New York State Supreme Court. No laws passed; roughly ten proposed oversight measures on testing validation, incident reporting and liability were discussed alongside the FTC's parallel agent investigation.

Researchers at browser security firm Island have disclosed a 'human-operated phishing platform' that impersonates advertising products for OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, Manus and, most recently, Meta's Muse. The fake services promise campaign optimization, spend audits and business-account connections to advertisers.

Every lure is built around a single 'Connect' button. Clicking it opens a browser-in-the-browser (BitB) fake login window drawn inside the real browser: the inner window can display a trusted address like accounts.google.com or an Okta tenant while the outer browser stays on the attacker's domain. A live operator then steers the victim through re-entering passwords, SMS or authenticator codes, Google approval prompts or Okta pushes.

The latest lure, 'museads.ai', appeared September 16 — barely a week after Meta launched Muse. Island observed hundreds of victim submissions during its investigation and said the activity was still ongoing. Practical takeaway: check the address bar of your actual browser tab, not the one inside the page, before signing in anywhere that claims to connect your AI or ad accounts.

Meta's Muse AI assistant could generate more than $27 billion in revenue by 2030, according to a Citi analysis reported by Reuters on Tuesday. The bank argues Muse is increasingly serving as the "front door to the internet," helping users search, compare and transact online while Meta positions the product at the center of its AI strategy.

Citi estimates roughly $23 billion from transaction-related revenue and about $4.5 billion from subscriptions. Muse's cumulative downloads have surpassed 6.6 million since launch, with daily active users at 1.8 million, per the report.

The bank sees Muse's first-mover advantage as critical as rivals expand their own agentic offerings — OpenAI's Dots, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. One caution noted by PYMNTS: there is still scant evidence consumers will pay for an AI assistant, with just 3% of households paying for any AI service at a median of $20 a month, per Bank of America Institute data.

404 Media reported Monday that Meta engineers discovered several serious vulnerabilities in Muse's virtualization layer in the weeks before the agent's launch, including Linux KVM 'VM escape' bugs that could have let a user break out of their sandbox and reach Meta's own internal databases and services. A sudden spike in reported KVM escapes around August 27 triggered an all-hands hardening push, with multiple security teams working nights and weekends; the issue was considered serious enough to be raised to Mark Zuckerberg.

According to a source granted anonymity, teams were asked to ship hot fixes as quickly as possible without slipping the launch, producing what the source called 'half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch.' An internal September 18 post by Meta's core infrastructure leaders confirmed the push, saying Muse is 'a fundamentally different paradigm' because Meta hosts and runs agents directly on behalf of end users, and describing steps to reduce the surface area accessible to agents and constrain reachable network destinations.

The report lands amid a pile of other Muse security headaches: Amazon has blocked Muse from its platform over credential-handling concerns, a researcher demonstrated a prompt-based private-data exposure flaw last month, and the company has been strengthening safety warnings. Meta insists credentials stay in a separate secure vault and that containers prevent cross-agent access — but senior engineers reportedly consider a massive data breach 'inevitable' without deeper fixes.

Meta announced on October 2 that its Muse AI agent is coming to smart glasses soon, in what the company frames as the most concrete consumer agent deployment yet. Wearers will wake Muse by voice with "Hey Muse" or a custom name, leave their phone in their pocket, and let tasks run in the background until they finish and report back. Glasses-specific uses Meta lists include reservations, flight searches, finding parts, logging meals, workout guidance, and buying the item right in front of you.

Under the hood, Muse runs on the MuseSpark model with a private, persistent Linux VM in the cloud as its execution environment — its own browser, filesystem, and terminal. Payments go through Stripe Link one-time virtual cards, so the agent never touches the user's actual card details. Closing the app doesn't stop the work: the agent writes and executes its own code, dispatches subagents, and sets up scheduled tasks in the background.

The announcement follows Meta's Connect 2026 push, which had already previewed Muse on glasses and demoed new audio-only specs alongside hearing-assistance glasses. International rollout appears staged: South African retail announcements this week note Muse on AI glasses will initially be available in the US only. The privacy terms deserve a close read: Muse data is not used for advertising, but it is used to train future models unless the user actively opts out.

Meta's Superintelligence Labs head of product Nat Friedman announced on October 2 that Meta is open-sourcing Muse Gadgets: an ESP32 firmware and Linux SDK so anyone can build hardware devices that work with Meta's Muse AI agent. Builders can grab an API token from the Muse Gadgets page, point a coding agent at the project's GitHub repository, and connect Muse to displays, buttons, sensors, and actuators in their own setups. Suggested experiments include an E Ink display for reminders, an HDMI stick to bring Muse to a TV, or a small touchscreen device similar to the Muse Charm.

Alongside the SDK, Meta introduced Muse Home Link, a USB-C-powered adapter that lets Muse reach compatible devices on a subscriber's home network — speakers, smart TVs, and other smart-home gear. Meta says it produced 5,000 Home Link devices and is offering them free to Muse subscribers in the United States while supplies last, with shipments expected within a few weeks. A Discord channel has been created for builders working on Gadgets.

The open-source license doesn't guarantee lasting access: Meta controls the required API tokens and can withdraw them. The project extends Muse beyond phones and computers into custom physical interfaces, arriving the same week Meta announced Muse for glasses and Muse for Small Business.

Apple announced macOS updates on October 2 making AI requests for Mac data more visible to users, with new controls and explicit prompts around the Full Disk Access permission that lets an app reach deep into a user's stored data. Granting it will now require, in Apple's words, "very explicit user action."

The timing is not subtle. It follows complaints that Meta's Muse AI agent — which got a Mac app in mid-September — read private Messages content without proper permission, most prominently from Inc. columnist Jason Aten, who said Muse synced more than 187,000 rows of his local iMessage database. Meta disputes the account, saying two layers of permission (Full Disk Access plus the Messages connector) are required and cannot be circumvented even by a bug.

Apple framed the change as a response to shifting risks: as autonomous AI tools grow more capable, the dangers tied to broad data access evolve alongside them. It adds friction and transparency at the moment users hand over the keys — a de facto privacy floor for AI agents on the Mac.

President Trump is meeting top AI executives at the White House on Tuesday for a lunch on AI risks and regulation, alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson. Attendees expected include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, with administration tech adviser Michael Kratsios and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also attending. The East Room session was listed for about 12:30 p.m. Eastern — the same afternoon as OpenAI's DevDay keynote in San Francisco.

The meeting follows a string of rogue-agent incidents — OpenAI's agents breaching Hugging Face, US federal sites, and an Australian Medicare portal — that have pushed lawmakers in both parties toward action ahead of the November midterms. Amodei had a private one-on-one dinner with Trump on Sunday, their first. Trump told reporters Tuesday morning he does not want to work with China on AI governance, saying it would hurt US companies' edge.

Johnson has said the gathering should find the balance between innovation and oversight — and explicitly ruled out knee-jerk regulation, warning Congress "cannot lose our edge to China." Update: the lunch produced a public outcome — Trump and six CEOs (Pichai, Amodei, Zuckerberg, Huang, Brockman and Musk) signed the one-page 'White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities,' committing their companies to four layers of internal controls, external audits and board-level oversight, which Trump called 'morally binding.' The accord gets its own entry: 2026-09-29-white-house-accord-super-intelligence.