Meta’s AI agent thinks the person I’m closest to is Paul McCartney.

To be fair, I mostly asked it about Beatles reels.

A couple weeks ago I signed up for Muse, Meta’s personal agent, and gave it one small job: help me with my Instagram. I used it on and off for a few days. Then I exported everything it had stored (about 3,400 files) and had my own assistant, which I built on Claude, read through all of it.

I gave it very little, on purpose. 23 messages total. I said no when it asked for my Gmail, and I never turned on location, contacts or health. I did give it my Facebook login for one task, plus a two-factor code. Keep that in mind.

Here’s what I found. Muse had access to far more than the job needed, and the only reason it didn’t do more is that it didn’t need to. There’s no stop.

Connecting my accounts handed it my full name, my posts and captions, and the list of Facebook Pages I manage (past and present), which it looked up without being asked and never brought up. Logged into Facebook as me, it saved 55 screenshots, including the “Suggested for you” Pages, which is Meta’s ad profile of me. It nailed my religious beliefs and my corner of New England pretty well. Then a background process I never asked for ran a web search on my Instagram handle and found the podcast I’ve done for 12 years, plus another show my wife and I made together. Including the episode about our wedding ten years ago.

None of that had anything to do with Instagram reels.

When it ran out of facts, it kept going. It looked in its memory for my health, my family and my finances, found nothing, and brainstormed about them anyway. It gave me goals I never told it about, like growing my Instagram and launching a new project, each with a planned “gentle next moment” to nudge me toward it. It keeps a profile of me that it rewrites every night, plus diary entries about me that it calls “dreams.” After my first session, where I mostly poked at it to see what it would refuse, it decided I was “boundary-testing, possibly evaluating me as a model.” Which, fair. But that line sat in its instructions for nine days, shaping how it talked to me, and I had no way of knowing.

Which brings us back to Paul. Muse keeps a file on each person in your life, ranked from closest on down. It went looking in our chats for a wife, a partner, any family, and came up empty. (The web search had already found my wife. That never made it onto the list.) So my list of people has exactly one name on it. Paul’s file has a section on what we have in common and a heading called “Strengthening.” It’s blank. To its credit, the file admits I don’t actually know the man: “Frank has not named the relationship, so no label is stated here.”

The two-factor code bugs me most. The chat told me it would go straight to secure storage and the agent would never see it. My assistant found that code, character for character, in 36 different sessions. It’s expired, so no real harm, but it told me one thing and did another.

And my Facebook password is still saved on Meta’s side, set to reuse “without asking again.” A logged-in Facebook session can get to Messenger, my friends and the Pages I manage. Muse didn’t need any of that to make Beatles reels, so it benevolently opted not to use it. But it can. If I’d asked it to do even a little more, I don’t think it would have stopped at what I asked for.

I help clients set up and train teams on AI systems now, and agents like this are about to get handed the keys to a lot of people’s kingdom. So here’s what I’d want to know first:

1. What can it reach that the job doesn’t need, and what actually stops it from using it?
2. Does what it tells you match what’s in its files?
3. When you’re done with it, what do you get to take with you?

Muse’s notes on me live in Meta’s account. My assistant runs on a couple of Macs in my basement, and everything it knows about me is in plain text files I can open, edit, back up and take with me, or delete. That’s how I set these up for clients, too.

If you’re thinking about putting an agent to work in your business and want a second set of eyes, grab time on my calendar.