I believe $META will continue to move higher as investors better appreciate the disruptive power and reach of META’s new Muse personal AI agent to shop, pay bills, and manage their lives. At 24x 2026 EPS vs long-term future rev and EPS growth of +15%, META still looks attractive despite a +30% gain so far in September (vs NDX +3%). Bloomberg Opinion By Dave Lee 09/23/2026 04:30:07 I’m Using Meta’s AI Agent and Amazon Can’t Stand It. ▪Meta Platforms Inc. has released a new AI agent called Muse, which can organize calendars, scour Facebook Marketplace, and buy things from Amazon, but Amazon has blocked Muse from accessing its store. ▪The move is a sign of things to come as Silicon Valley giants try to protect their entrenched advantages in the age of artificial-intelligence agents, and consumers will lose out if their preferred agent can't work well with the full range of digital services. ▪The issue of interoperability, or the ability for AI agents to talk to services and to one another, becomes the central question, and companies may need to find ways to work together or risk being forced to open up, with the courts potentially being asked to judge what's fair. (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Meta Platforms Inc. is rightly receiving plaudits for its new AI agent, Muse. I’ve been using it, and it’s plainly the most impressive product Meta has released in years. Harold — the name I gave to my bot — works to organize my calendar, scour Facebook Marketplace for good deals and buy things, with my blessing, from Amazon.com Inc. Except, actually, scratch that last example. Amazon has blocked poor Harold, along with all the other Muse agents, from accessing its store. The move is a sign of things to come as Silicon Valley giants try to protect their entrenched advantages in the age of artificial-intelligence agents.  Consumers will lose out if their preferred agent can’t work well with the full range of digital services to which they have become accustomed. These competitors will need to find ways to work together or risk being forced to open up. Meta has surprised many, myself included, to be the first of the tech giants to popularize a consumer AI agent, the term given to an AI bot that can carry out tasks on its own. “Muse is a killer product and an inflection point,” wrote analysts at Jefferies, who raised the company’s stock price target to $875 a share, compared with $736.60 at Tuesday’s close. Sensor Tower said Muse had been downloaded some 900,000 times over six days. But a head start doesn’t win the race, and Amazon’s action against Muse’s agents will not be the only instance of a competitor putting up the barriers. Muse isn’t the first AI bot Amazon has sought to block from being able to autonomously shop on its store. It did the same to Perplexity earlier this year, throwing in a lawsuit for good measure. Amazon contends its motive is security and data privacy: How does it know a bot is genuinely acting on a real customer’s wishes? There are also other obvious factors. AI agents don’t look at or click on advertising. And Amazon would much prefer people to use its AI shopping bot instead. If Muse wins and becomes a popular way to buy goods online, Amazon would, to those customers, become a faceless logistics company. Relatedly, Shopify — already a faceless logistics company by design — announced on Tuesday that it was partnering with Muse, though no terms were disclosed. Such deals might force Amazon’s hand. Some of the tension stems from the prevailing wisdom that says, in consumer AI, one personal AI agent may end up conquering them all, in the way that Google triumphed in online search or Apple won with the iPhone.

2/ To achieve that kind of footing, however, a bot will need to do all of the things, handling tasks and accessing data across the platforms and devices the public is familiar with already. Interoperability — the ability for these bots to talk to these services, and to one another — becomes the central question. What good is a Google AI assistant if it can’t buy things from Amazon or look up things on community groups on Facebook? How useful is Amazon’s Alexa if “she” can’t access the real-world data trove of Google Maps? How smart is a Meta bot — cover your ears, Harold — if it can’t access Google or Amazon? But then, flip the question over: Why should Google (or any company) share what has taken years and billions of dollars to build?  It has the makings of an all-out brawl as companies find ways to maneuver around restrictions placed on them by their rivals while simultaneously taking steps to protect their own golden goose. The courts will be asked to judge what’s fair. “If a company has a monopoly or market dominance in a certain area,” explained Fiona M. Scott Morton, a Yale economics professor who specializes in antitrust matters, “and along comes AI to erode that dominance, the actions that that firm takes to maintain its dominance might be an unlawful maintenance of a monopoly.” We should feel grateful that it’s a feature of the US tech industry, rather than a bug, that this is an issue at all. In China, companies such as Tencent have no such worry, given how much of what the Chinese consumer would want in a chatbot is under their singular roof. In the West, no one company does it all. For the past 20 years, the biggest tech companies have only dabbled in one another’s core lanes — like Microsoft Corp. trying to make a good search engine — and shared only the biggest of pies, such as cloud computing and online advertising. AI agents are a different story. America’s tech giants are truly competing on them. Thinking about this brought to mind a row in 2017 involving Google and Amazon. The former had suddenly decided to yank YouTube — a most golden of geese— from being accessible on Amazon’s Echo Show and Fire TV platforms. Google, which at the time was getting its competing home assistant and TV platform off the ground, complained Amazon’s conduit violated Google’s terms of service, “creating a broken user experience.” Both sides accused the other of putting customers in the middle. It took the best part of two years to be resolved. The stakes are far higher this time around. Expect a flurry of lawsuits. There will be attempts at some you-scratch-my-back deals, similar in nature to Google’s deal with Apple to be the default search engine on the iPhone. That deal has since been declared illegal (), but it was too late to make much difference - the search engine wars long over. One prediction might be that as the main platforms protect access to their own products, consumers end up being forced to juggle several agents at a time. Yuck. Not only would that be a dismal user experience, it would make it far more difficult for companies to eke out meaningful subscription revenue. If you use Muse excessively, Meta will charge a $16/month subscription to continue using it, rising to as much as $80/month for power users. Persuading the general public to pay for one AI agent is difficult; asking them to pay for several is a nonstarter. Another prediction is that Apple and Google, as proprietors of the two largest mobile operating systems, will be in an almost unassailable position. Their own agents — Siri AI and Gemini, respectively — can be more deeply integrated into their devices, providing a richness of data and access to a phone’s functions — such as the camera or text messages — that no other AI agents can easily match.