Meta gives away Muse tokens now, bets on transaction fees later

Meta is giving away the product it hopes will anchor its next decade, betting that ubiquity now pays off in transaction fees later. At Connect 2026 in Menlo Park on 23 September, Mark Zuckerberg repositioned Meta around Muse, the personal AI agent it launched on 8 September in the US, Canada and Mexico, pushing it into AI glasses, the Mac, a new keychain device and, soon, its own email address.

The commercial logic is explicit. Muse runs free for a large number of tokens, with Meta expecting to "profit by taking a small fee from transactions," Zuckerberg said. That undercuts rivals charging upfront for agentic AI and instead ties Meta's revenue directly to how much shopping, booking and form-filling users route through Muse.

Meta is stacking connectors to make that happen: Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Wayfair, Gap, Shop Pay, PayPal, Expedia, Instacart, Notion, Granola, GitHub and Box are now linked. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said more than 1,500 developers applied to build connectors in under a week and teased a new Meta Superintelligence Labs model coming "soon."

Hardware is the delivery mechanism. Muse reaches AI glasses in the coming months, triggered by voice and able to act on what the wearer sees, for tasks like guided workouts or appointment booking. Meta Adventurer glasses launch at $249 on 23 October; Ray-Ban Meta Audio, Meta's first camera-free glasses, ships 13 October at $349; Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 costs $449; the Ray-Ban Meta Display expands to the UK, Canada, France, Italy and Germany at $799; Meta VR Glasses arrive in spring 2027 at $1,299.99. A Muse Charm keychain, showing the agent's avatar on a small screen, lets users carry Muse without a phone, with details due later in 2026.

Not every retailer wants in. Amazon has blocked Muse from shopping on its site, arguing the agent's access breaches its terms of service, a sign that agentic commerce is already colliding with platforms unwilling to cede checkout control. See TechCrunch's rundown of the Connect 2026 announcements and Meta's own summary.

Meta is trying to make Muse the default interface across every device it sells, then monetise the payments flowing through it rather than the software itself. That puts Meta in direct competition with Amazon and other retailers for control of the checkout moment, not just the AI assistant market. Amazon's block shows the friction: retailers that depend on owning the purchase funnel have no incentive to let a third-party agent disintermediate them, and Meta's transaction-fee model only works where partners cooperate. The 1,500-plus developer applications suggest builders see an opportunity in connectors regardless, which gives Meta leverage even if some large retailers hold out.