Meta has seen a wave of AI enthusiasm ahead of the annual developer conference Meta Connect. The newly launched personal proxy application Muse quickly rose to the top of the Apple App Store, which also helped boost the company's stock price. However, just as this product was gaining momentum, it encountered direct obstruction from large platforms.

Amazon prohibits shopping on behalf of others

According to CNBC, the role of Muse is to handle a portion of online transactions for users, including making appointments, arranging travel, filling out electronic forms, viewing home security cameras, as well as searching for products across websites and completing payments. Meta also attempts to connect Muse with services such as Shopify and Stripe to form a more complete consumer experience.

But Amazon has clearly rejected this model. The company stated that if third-party apps shop on behalf of users on other enterprise platforms, they should operate in an open manner and respect the decision of whether the service provider wishes to participate or not. According to Amazon, Muse purchasing goods on behalf of customers within its e-commerce app violates the platform's service terms.

Platform competition for user access points

This friction reflects a larger change: AI agents are attempting to take over the consumer journey from search to order placement, while e-commerce platforms are reluctant to hand over this entry point to external AI.

Analyst Max Willens from market research firm Emarketer stated that in the past, many American consumers thought of Amazon first when shopping online, but now more and more users may start their search for products with AI assistants. As this behavior increases, Amazon will place even more emphasis on its position in the consumer chain.

Amazon has also taken similar actions before. Reports mention that Amazon once sued Perplexity, accusing the latter of attempting to hide the scraping activities of its AI proxies in order to continue scraping content from retail websites without permission. Amazon has also imposed restrictions on some proxy tools used by OpenAI and Google.

Meta Betting on Glasses Scene

For Meta, the early performance of Muse reignited Wall Street's optimism regarding its AI business. Reports indicate that the stock price of Meta rose by more than 20% within two weeks of the launch of Muse, and the annual cumulative increase also returned to a level close to that of the Nasdaq index.

Some analysts believe that the early business model of Muse may still be in the subsidy phase, but Meta has the potential to develop into a free value-added product. Analysts from Mizuho predict that Meta will take Muse from a single application to a platform-level product at this Connect conference, with a possible focus on integration with smart glasses.

The institution believes that if Muse and Meta integrate with the wearable devices they are promoting, it could extend AI's presence from mobile applications to hardware interfaces that are more closely related to daily life. This is also seen as one of the clearer consumer-oriented implementation directions for Meta at present.

Privacy concerns remain unresolved.

However, for Muse to truly expand its range of use, it still faces the issue of user trust. Joseph Turow, a scholar in digital media and privacy research at the University of Pennsylvania, stated that some users will try such personal proxies, but many will still be cautious about entrusting sensitive data to the platforms.

The report also mentioned that Meta is currently facing a challenging external environment. On one hand, the AI industry is undergoing more intense discussions regarding security and governance; on the other hand, Meta recently agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle lawsuits brought by multiple states concerning adolescent mental health issues. With the expansion of generative AI and chatbots, concerns about addiction, privacy, and security are also on the rise among the public.