The AI Wire ●

Meta is expanding its AI-based age-detection technology globally on Instagram, using signals that suggest an account belongs to a teenager even when the registered date of birth says adult. Accounts the system identifies as teen-owned are moved into Instagram's Teen Account settings, which limit unwanted contact and sensitive content and nudge users to take breaks.

In Australia, Meta has also started using Apple's age-range signal as an additional check, shared with parental permission when a phone is set up for a teenager. In the US, parents will begin receiving notifications this month explaining how Instagram identifies teenage users and applies age-appropriate settings.

Meta said similar age-detection is continuing to roll out on Facebook, with comparable measures planned globally on Threads later this year, alongside work to identify accounts belonging to children under 13. The company repeated its call for app-store-level age verification laws, arguing a shared verified signal would be more consistent than each platform running its own checks.

Meta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Ember on Monday, November 9, the lab's lightest and most cost-efficient model yet and the fourth model under the Muse brand, after Spark in April, its open-source twin Glimmer in August, and the Wonder frontier model in October. Meta says Ember is designed for complex reasoning execution and the work agents repeat all day: tool calls, coding subtasks, routing, extraction and long document parsing. RuntimeWire, citing Mark Zuckerberg's announcement post on X, says Ember is available on the Meta Model API and in Muse Code.

Price is the headline: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. Meta pitched Ember on cost per task, using Artificial Analysis's composite benchmark score to present it as cheaper and smarter than Anthropic's Haiku and OpenAI's Luna, and cost-competitive with open-source rivals DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash. The intended pairing is a split of labour — in Meta's words, 'Muse Wonder plans, Muse Ember handles the volume.'

Ember is also multimodal: Meta says agents can read screenshots, charts and scanned documents, or work from voice memos, meeting recordings and video, without a separate model. No independent benchmark report for Ember had appeared at launch; the cost-per-task comparisons are Meta's own, built on the Artificial Analysis composite.

A day after Meta rolled out Muse's Active Memory and Spaces, Alexandr Wang kept posting character clips and wrote: "pov: training everyone's muse to dance before our launch this week." That is the whole signal so far — a teaser from Meta's chief AI officer, not a ship notice.

Wang did not say what is launching: a new model, a voice feature, or something else. He gave no date and no feature list, and Meta's official accounts were quiet overnight.

Treat this as a launch watch, not a launch. If Meta ships something this week, this entry will be updated with what actually arrived.

Meta announced on November 6 that Spaces are now available everywhere Muse is available. Describe an idea to Muse and it builds a persistent, customised experience inside the app — a holiday gift tracker, a daily word game, a DIY planning board — that you can keep refining by asking Muse to add pieces, change the look or tweak how it works.

Spaces live in the app itself: you can pin them to the sidebar or main tabs, hide them, or schedule when they appear, so a weekly planner can show during the workweek and give way to weekend plans on Saturday. Meta's examples run from shopping hubs and music trackers to school dashboards, wedding planners, order trackers and freelance client hubs.

Connected apps let a Space update in the background with price changes, new concert dates or savings progress, and you can check off items and edit directly inside it. Mark Zuckerberg said he had built a BBQ game, an event tracker and a home control dashboard this way. Sharing and collaborative Spaces are still under exploration, so the launch is centred on individual use.

Alongside Spaces, Meta AI Research introduced specialized versions of its existing models for Muse and Meta AI on November 6, trained using learnings from Muse Wonder. The models bring in Active Memory, meant to retain relevant earlier information and distinguish temporary, permanent, current and stale information, and Active Focus, meant to keep work moving toward a goal when obstacles arise by trying harder, recovering or finding alternatives.

Meta's own figures: the current Muse model scores 47% on its Personal Superintelligence Index, up from 38% for the previous model, correctly used critical context in 90% of Active Memory tasks versus 76% before, and is 2.4 times less likely to forget critical information. Meta also reports a 67% improvement in completing everyday tasks when unexpected issues arise.

RuntimeWire notes the rollout reaches all users after Muse passed 10 million setups in North America. In Meta AI, the same changes are meant to break complex problems into steps, produce sharper follow-up questions and accommodate changes of direction mid-conversation. All performance figures are Meta's own claims.

Meta opened Muse Voice to everyone in the United States on November 5, letting users call and video chat in real time with Muse, its consumer AI agent. The feature, first previewed at Connect in September, runs on new Muse Realtime Avatar and Muse Realtime Voice models and works on mobile, web and Mac.

What sets it apart from rivals' voice modes is a persistent animated avatar, nicknamed Jolly, which users can customise into a person, an animal or another character. Meta says the avatar uses subtle expressions and gestures matched to the tone of the conversation; it hears the user but does not actually see them. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang announced the rollout with a demo of his own Muse on X.

Support for Meta's AI Glasses and the planned Muse Charm wearable is listed as coming later. TechCrunch reports the Charm, a small Tamagotchi-like device with a screen for the avatar, is planned before year-end.

AI agents that research and buy products on a shopper's behalf — like Meta's Muse — are posing a conundrum for the big retailers, Reuters reported on November 4: let agents shop your store and you may lose the lucrative advertising brands pay for placement, plus the customer data that fuels it. Morgan Stanley researchers estimated in July that such agents could account for 10% to 20% of US e-commerce spending by 2030.

The two giants have split. Amazon banned Muse from its website in September, saying the agent appeared to have accessed its store without authorisation, capturing and storing customer credentials; Meta declined to comment. Amazon told Reuters this week that third-party agents should operate openly and respect service providers' decisions about whether to participate.

Walmart went the other way, rolling out infrastructure on October 21 to enable third-party agentic commerce and officially partnering with Meta's tool. The split is the shopping-agent question in miniature: the agent works for the shopper, but the store it shops in is an advertising business — and the two models do not obviously fit together.

Meta has paid roughly $1.2 million in bug bounties for its Muse personal AI agent, the company said in a blog post shared by David Singleton and reported by SecurityWeek on November 4. The programme ran privately from April and went public at Muse's September 8 launch; of more than 630 reports received, 64 were valid. Meta pays up to $300,000 per valid report — several times the top rewards it says other leading AI developers advertise — with prompt-injection attacks on a single user worth up to $130,000 and a fleetwide compromise up to $250,000.

The largest award, the full $300,000, was paid four months before launch, while Muse was still in early internal testing: a researcher demonstrated access to conversations and authentication tokens on the pre-release virtual machines Meta staff used to test the product. An authentication check had treated a header added by a local HTTPS proxy as proof a request came from a trusted source, and a system migration added a second proxy layer that let outside requests carry the trusted header too. Meta took the service offline, fixed the bug and stopped treating the local machine as trusted.

Two further $90,000 awards cover the agent-specific risks: a malicious web page that, when Muse was asked to summarise it, mimicked status messages from the agent's browsing tool and got it to execute actions that should have been caught — Meta says its classifiers now catch the attack and 100 variants — and a formatting trick that slipped one-time passcodes past Muse's email redaction filters. A $50,000 award covered an Android flaw that let a malicious app load an attacker's page into a privileged web view, and $1,000 a Mac flaw that could hijack auto-update. For an agent that acts across a user's email, calendar and messaging accounts, the bounty table is a map of what can go wrong.

Meta has acquired Conductor, the startup whose Mac-native tool lets developers run several AI coding agents at once in parallel workspaces. Axios reported the deal first on November 4; founder and CEO Charlie Holtz confirmed it on Conductor's blog the same day, and Meta confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Conductor, founded in 2024 and launched in July 2025 after a $22 million Series A, builds no models of its own — it orchestrates other labs' agents, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor and OpenCode, each in an isolated workspace. The team is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, working with chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and product head Nat Friedman, with something new promised for early 2027. Meta launched its own coding agent, Muse Code, in August and has reported more than 10 million users for its Muse agents.

For current users the clock is already running. Conductor has stopped new sign-ups and downloads; Conductor Cloud goes read-only on November 13 and shuts down permanently on November 20, after which cloud user data will be deleted. The local app keeps receiving new models and critical bug fixes until early 2027.

A WIRED investigation published November 2, built on research by the nonprofit AI Forensics and cybersecurity firm Infoblox, found a network of more than 400 connected apps and websites posing as everyday tools — pet-photo editors, language tutors, workout planners — that could secretly load interfaces for making sexually abusive and violent deepfakes from uploaded photos. A server-side switch turned the hidden features on after the apps passed store review, in some cases triggered by arriving through a Meta ad.

The scale ran through both major stores. On Google Play, 27 of the apps were live in September with more than 350,000 combined downloads, including DiffAI at over 100,000 installs; Google had removed most of them before WIRED got in touch. Apple removed 19 apps after WIRED contacted it, including the pet-photo app Viefur, and said the apps complied at review and were changed afterwards — adding it has suspended tens of thousands of apps for similar bait-and-switch tactics in the past year.

Researchers traced the network to Chinese-language codebases and a Hong Kong-registered company, KeLing Technology Limited, registering as many as 30 domain-and-app combinations a week at its peak. Meta said it banned KeLing in 2025 after a cease-and-desist, and reported acting against 11,600 ad accounts, about 4,700 business pages and 209 apps on its advertising platform, while WIRED found more than 84,000 ads tied to the network had run on Meta since January 1.

Meta's Muse was among the hottest topics on corporate earnings calls in recent weeks, with Wall Street worrying that proactive shopping agents will erode brand loyalty, ignite price wars and squeeze corporate profits. But when WIRED asked executives across roughly 50 companies — spanning travel, internet providers, food and self-storage — the answer was a shrug. DoorDash described the number of orders from Muse and other agents as in the 'hundreds.' T-Mobile remarked: 'We haven't seen anything of significance' from agents.

The friction is concrete at the companies that have looked closely. Chipotle's chief digital officer Arlie Sisson said agents have struggled to complete purchases because of hiccups applying loyalty discounts or ordering after hours — though Muse's debut did increase Chipotle's agentic orders by a single-digit percentage.

Meta's own numbers, from its earnings call this month, point the other way: more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have activated Muse, over 25 percent of them used it for shopping — more than any other task and above the company's expectations — and Meta points to partnerships with 10 retailers including Walmart, Best Buy and Gap to simplify shopping with the agent. Many of those retailers last reported earnings before Muse launched and have not shared data on it yet, and executives generally acknowledged agent-driven commerce is still in its early stages rather than a non-event.

A Wall Street Journal follow-up, reported on November 1, sharpens what is at stake for one company in particular: Muse's shopping agent is emerging as a threat to Amazon's nearly $70 billion advertising business, because agents that compare prices and choose products can weaken the sponsored placements Amazon sells. Amazon says its advertising business has not been meaningfully affected so far.

The Verge's Sean Hollister has built his own version of Meta's Muse Charm, the squishy AI companion pendant Meta plans to sell this holiday season, for $50. His hardware is a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a 1.75-inch touchscreen pendant that Meta itself officially suggests as a starting point for building a 'Muse Gadget' — Meta publishes open-source code and tokens so the devkit connects directly to the Muse AI cloud, and he paired it with the Muse phone app.

Out of the box the gadget was limited: Muse treated spoken input as clips to transcribe rather than commands, replies were slow, and only a few words fit on screen at a time. Hollister, who says he has no coding background, used sessions with Anthropic's Claude Code to fix much of that — adding a conversation history page, an ElevenLabs voice that speaks answers aloud, a remote camera viewfinder, a batch of avatars and a Tamagotchi-style minigame, plus a pocket-watch face and video playback.

His trust limits are part of the story: he kept the device on a guest Wi-Fi network and says he does not trust Meta or Muse with his home network or email. Meta's retail Charm adds cameras and a 5G radio the devkit lacks, and its price is still unannounced. Whether the retail unit will be as freely programmable as the devkit version remains an open question.

Meta has built a humanoid robot prototype, internally called Max, with Chinese robotics company Fourier, completing the machine in about three months, The Information reported on October 31, citing people familiar with the project. Reuters relayed the report the same day but said it could not immediately verify it. Inside Meta, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth has reportedly described humanoids as a physical embodiment of Muse, the company's consumer AI agent, with the goal of a robot that can take on practical tasks in the home.

Max reportedly stands about 1.5 metres tall and weighs about 48 kilograms (106 pounds), runs on Nvidia's Jetson Thor chip, and has five-fingered hands that can grasp small bottles and toys, dual chest speakers and a face that mimics human expressions. Li-Chen Miller, Meta's vice president of product for robotics, spent nearly two months at Fourier's factory in Shanghai, and Max was shown at an internal robotics summit in late August.

Work on a second version, Max 2, reportedly began in September, with a redesigned torso, improved hands, a projector and extra sensors to help it handle stairs. A Meta spokesperson told The Information the Fourier effort is focused on internal research and experimentation and that the company has no plans to sell these units; no launch date for any Meta humanoid has been set.

Meta has been attaching cryptographic signatures to a growing number of web requests from its Muse personal agent and its Meta-WebIndexer crawler since around October 12, according to Jérôme Segura, VP of Threat Research at bot-management company DataDome, who described the observation in a LinkedIn post on October 30. The signatures use Web Bot Auth, a protocol that lets a website verify that an automated visitor really comes from the company it claims.

Segura was careful about the limits of what he saw: there has been no public or official announcement from Meta, the signed requests are still a relatively small share, and early signed traffic may have run under a Meta-ExternalTest user-agent string. Meta's public crawler documentation, as of October 31, lists five automated agents and mentions neither Web Bot Auth nor a test agent. DataDome says it now validates the signed requests for its customers.

Signed agent identity is becoming a live issue as personal agents like Muse browse and transact on users' behalf: sites want a way to tell a genuine Muse visit from an impersonator. Meta's revised crawling terms are due to take effect on November 20. Until Meta documents the change, this stays rumor-grade — a single researcher's observation, however credible the source.

Big Tech's earnings week turned into a referendum on AI spending on Friday, October 30. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are set to lose a combined $900 billion in market value after their quarterly results, according to the Financial Times, as investors recoil not from weak sales but from the sheer size of the cash burn attached to the AI infrastructure race. The Nasdaq Composite fell roughly 3% on Friday and the S&P 500 about 1.8%, capping the worst week for the Nasdaq since April.

The numbers behind the nerves are large: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are planning a combined $660 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, up 60% from $410 billion in 2025. Amazon alone guided 2026 capex to about $200 billion, roughly $50 billion more than expected, and its shares fell; Microsoft has dropped sharply since reporting even though cloud revenue rose, with data-center spending up 66%.

Alphabet has posted two straight quarters of negative free cash flow for the first time on record as AI spending outpaces revenue growth, and Meta recently disclosed its first negative-free-cash-flow quarter since 2012. Analysts quoted in the coverage say the burden is now on the hyperscalers to prove the spending earns attractive returns.