Last week, Meta executives announced that its much-hyped AI agent, Muse, had a new feature: It could call businesses for you to do things like make a restaurant reservation or a haircut appointment. But in reality, Meta is testing having these calls being made by human beings in call centers, 404 Media has learned.
“We just expanded the @muse beta for outbound calls to US businesses,” Ryan Fox, the principal engineer
on Muse posted on X
on Sept. 16.
Alexandr Wang
, Meta’s chief AI officer, posted “we’re expanding our phone beta for muse!”
we're expanding our ☎️ 📞 beta for muse!
https://t.co/ZJnXM2vb4U
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang)
September 16, 2026
Internally, however, the company announced the features to employees and said that it had “added a human agent layer for calls to get completed,” and that “Muse human agent calls [sic] is ready for company dogfooding,” or testing.
“Muse doesn’t just dial a number. It calls a business on your behalf, handles the conversation, completes your request, and reports back with a transcript and a summary,” the internal message board post to employees, seen by 404 Media, reads. “It also no longer works alone. Muse is now able to hand requests to a trained human agent, who places the call and works it through.”
“This is still a confidential, pre-launch product,” the post adds. “Please don’t share it, or anything it producers, with anyone outside the company.”
Once again, a core feature of a major piece of AI technology will actually just be people working in a call center, doing work that a company says AI is doing. It is not clear how often or when a call is routed to a so-called “human agent,” and when a call is done exclusively by AI.
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Do you work for Meta or know anything more about Muse? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.
The fact that human beings are involved in the call raised questions
… [more]
