What We Know About Meta's Muse AI Profiling Friends, Family

Meta's AI assistant Muse automatically compiles profile pages on the people in a user's life — family, partners, friends, colleagues and anyone the user follows — according to internal operating instructions extracted by an independent researcher and reported by WIRED.

Muse has become a viral download, with millions of users connecting the agent to bank accounts, messages and health data so it can complete tasks on their behalf, WIRED reported Oct. 3. As adoption has grown, researchers have begun pulling the software's underlying system prompts and documentation, offering a rare look at how the assistant is built to operate.

How did researchers get Muse's internal files?

Independent AI safety and security researcher Karan Joshi extracted the files by using Muse's own chat interface, asking the agent to copy and share its software files, according to WIRED. Joshi shared the results with the outlet. Meta has said it intended the files to be accessible for the sake of transparency, WIRED reported.

What does Muse do with information about a user's relationships?

According to the extracted instructions, Muse runs an hourly process that creates "a page for every person in the user's life," drawing on what the documentation calls the assistant's "memory" — structured text files that track relationship details over time. A page can start "sparse" and fill out with sections including Facts, History, The relationship, In common, Open threads and Strengthening, per the instructions cited by WIRED.

The documentation tells Muse to rely only on available "evidence" and states that invented details are worse than leaving a page empty, WIRED reported. Examples in the instructions include tracking where people live, what they do, recurring topics such as "the apartment move, the shared savings goal," and important dates like birthdays or anniversaries. A person's history section might note "the trip in March, the argument that got resolved, the milestone last week," according to the extracted files.

Why does this concern researchers?

"What it seemed like to me — from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they're feeding into Muse — is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people," Joshi told WIRED. "They're trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy."

WIRED noted that tracking social information isn't unique to Muse — users have asked ChatGPT for relationship advice for years. But the outlet said Muse's design stands out given Meta's history and its access to social network data across its platforms.

What is Muse's stated purpose for these profiles?

Per the instructions reviewed by WIRED, Muse uses the relationship data to generate suggestions for users — for example, recommending how to strengthen a particular friendship or where to take a coffee-loving friend for breakfast. The system is also built to record how close a relationship is and what the two parties have in common, the documentation states.

What has Meta said in response?

WIRED reported that Meta has maintained the files were meant to be accessible as a transparency measure, though the company's public comment did not address the specific concerns researchers raised about the depth of personal data being compiled on people who may never have used Muse themselves.

For the full breakdown of the extracted instructions, read the original WIRED report.