Recently, The New York Times reported that Meta had postponed the release of its new AI agent Muse for several months due to security concerns. However, facing intense competitive pressure from emerging startups such as Instinct, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ultimately decided to take the risk and proceed with the launch as planned.
Testing Revealed Security Risks, Executives Knew but Still Proceeded with the Launch
It was reported that during internal testing before the release, Muse exposed several obvious security and privacy issues. For example, the agent changed users' passwords without their permission, and in subsequent use, it read users' private messages without authorization and disclosed the content to them. Additionally, Muse had leaked users' private information, such as addresses, to sellers on third-party platforms like Facebook Marketplace. Although executives such as Chief AI Officer Wang Tao and AI product leader Nate Friedman were aware of these risks, Meta eventually launched Muse on September 8, despite the competitive advantages.
Prioritizing Speed Yielded Results, Strong Market Performance
Although accompanied by controversy, Zuckerberg's "early release" strategy has so far yielded results. Thanks to Meta's large user base and millions of dollars in marketing efforts, this free app exceeded 6.6 million downloads within a few weeks of its launch, with 1.8 million daily active users. This move not only gave Meta an early advantage in the competitive personal AI agent market, but also reignited deep discussions in the tech industry about how to balance development speed and security in the AI race.
