Meta Says Muse Tops 10 Million Users as Shopping Gains Traction

Meta's Muse artificial intelligence assistant has surpassed 10 million users following its September launch, combining rapid adoption with growing interest in AI-powered shopping and personal productivity. During its third-quarter earnings call on October 21, 2026, CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the app's commercial potential, retention performance, and plans for expansion as the company works toward long-term profitability.

Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated on October 20 that Muse had accumulated 10.9 million downloads worldwide, including 10.2 million in the United States, during its first 40 days. The milestone placed it among just 12 mobile apps to reach 10 million US downloads within that period, joining Meta's Threads, Disney+, and several mobile games.

Sensor Tower reported that Muse retained 30% of its US users after seven days and 23% after 14 days. Competing AI applications, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, averaged retention rates of 19% and 16% over the same periods, respectively.

Muse also recorded 2.5 million daily active users for the first time on October 16, a 15% increase from the previous week. The app remained at the top of the US App Store charts on every day except October 19, when streaming app Kick briefly overtook it, according to the earlier report.

Meta's distribution network and advertising investment have helped accelerate adoption. The company can promote Muse across its family of applications, which collectively had 3.6 billion daily active users, while Sensor Tower data showed that Muse accounted for 39% of Meta's total advertising spending in October, up from 23% in September.

Zuckerberg also highlighted shopping as a significant use case during the earnings call. He said more than a quarter of Muse's engaged users who shopped through the AI agent had an average purchase value exceeding $200, a result that drew attention from industry observers.

The financial technology company Plaid provides a connector that allows Muse to support agent-based shopping by linking payment applications with customers' bank accounts. Zuckerberg described the company's experience with the integration as unusually strong.

"Plaid told us that they hadn't seen activity like they're seeing with their connector on any other service before," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO.

Beyond shopping, Zuckerberg identified personal productivity as another important application, including connecting Muse to users' email accounts and calendars. He pointed to these integrations as evidence that people were willing to trust the assistant with sensitive tasks.

Meta's current safeguards include Muse Secure VM, a feature designed to protect users' information and privacy. Zuckerberg also outlined plans for Muse Confidential VM, which he said would prevent Meta itself from viewing users' content.

With Muse reaching what Zuckerberg described as product-market fit, Meta plans to focus on expanding adoption, generating revenue, and reducing computing expenses. The company expects the assistant eventually to generate more revenue per user than its existing family of applications, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, which currently brings in several hundreds of dollars annually per user, according to Zuckerberg.

Meta intends to keep Muse free for most users while taking a share of commerce conducted through the platform. Customers seeking access to the most advanced AI models or additional tokens will also have to pay, creating potential revenue streams from both transactions and subscriptions.

Computing costs remain a major obstacle because operating an advanced AI assistant requires substantial infrastructure. Zuckerberg said Meta was developing enough capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years and expected to improve Muse's computing cost efficiency by more than 10 times within the next year.

"On the compute side, we are building out the capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years. In the near term, Muse is very compute-intensive to run, but we expect to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year, which will enable it to be profitable once the revenue lines are at scale," Zuckerberg told analysts and bankers during the third-quarter earnings call.

Muse is also expected to support Meta's smart glasses strategy, linking its AI capabilities with the company's hardware ambitions. Meanwhile, Meta's Reality Labs division, which oversees smart glasses, virtual reality, and metaverse projects, continues to generate substantial losses, although the company expects those losses to decline from $19.1 billion in 2025 to $15 billion in 2026.

Zuckerberg additionally previewed a planned Muse network that would allow different users' AI assistants to collaborate. The concept would extend the product beyond individual interactions and could change how consumers communicate with businesses through AI agents.

"And if you want to buy something, it's not just navigating to that business's website; it's talking to their agent," Zuckerberg said.

Despite its strong US performance, Muse remains geographically limited compared with established competitors. Sensor Tower estimated that ChatGPT generated 3.7 million US downloads during its first 40 days, while Grok recorded 500,000 and Claude recorded 200,000. ChatGPT attracted approximately 15 million downloads worldwide over its corresponding launch period, benefiting from availability in markets including Japan, Brazil, and Germany, whereas Muse was available only in the United States and Canada at the time of the reports.