Meta’s New Muse & Paramount Cleared to Buy Warner Bros.

John Corteau (0:00)

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Meta's AI agent is topping the App Store charts, but will be enough to move the company's bottom line.

Dylan Lewis (0:37)

And why corn might be the path to lowering gas prices.

John Corteau (0:39)

For Tuesday, September 22nd, it's Brew Markets Daily. I'm John Corteau.

Dylan Lewis (0:43)

And I'm Dylan Lewis. Let's get moving and grooving.

John Corteau (0:53)

All right. Coming up, we've got all the deets on the Paramount, Warner Brothers deal and a corny update for drivers looking to save money on gas. But Dylan, start us off with a bit of an amuse bouche.

Dylan Lewis (1:04)

Yeah.

Nice little pun to get us rolling there, John. Agentic AI has been a tremendous buzzword for 2026

Finally, consumers have their hands on an AI agent from Big Tech. Meta launched its Muse product a few weeks ago, and it leapt to the top of the iOS app charts. It has been downloaded over a million times, and it's a really fascinating release for a couple reasons. The first is that it is really the first major foray into the consumer agentic space for a big tech company. A lot of these have been more on the enterprise side, or things that people use for work. The second is that Meta is positioning it as a subscription product with advanced features. Users would pay somewhere between $20 and $100 per month. And so analysts on Wall Street are excited about this because it potentially opens up a new revenue stream for a business that is overwhelmingly reliant on advertising. Last quarter, 98% of Meta's revenue came from ads. If you're trying to do some back of the envelope math and kind of understand how this pencils out, for Muse to begin even showing up as a percentage, a single percentage of revenue for Meta, it would likely need over 10 million paid users. It is certainly a long way from that, but the launch is definitely a start, John.

John Corteau (2:12)

Right, and the launch has been very successful, but it's not all rosy. In order to be a useful assistant, it does need to access a lot of user permissions and logins. And that creates security vulnerabilities.

Ars Technica reported that security experts testing Muse found multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. Some of those things are native to an assistant intended to be able to schedule things for users, create documents, work across apps to communicate and do tasks. But there are some elements of the design that lead to more vulnerabilities. Without getting too technical, the experts told Ars Technica, quote, We can manipulate the agent and leverage its privileges to do whatever we want. Amazon also had their own concerns.

Dylan Lewis (2:54)

They blocked users from allowing Muse to do agentic shopping on their website. Users that did try to use Muse got the message, quote, Continued access by an unauthorized agent violates Amazon's conditions of use, to which our customers have agreed. It's unclear if that's due to security concerns or strategic concerns for Amazon. The e-commerce giant, of course, has its own models and its own AI ambitions. It may not want to open things up to a competitor. They also may want to see these agents be a little bit more battle-tested and maybe not have shoppers using it and having to deal with extra returns potentially upset shoppers as well. Right, exactly.

John Corteau (3:29)

There has to be extensive policies put in place for a deal like this. It makes me think of the classic, oh, I looked away and the toddler had the remote and ordered $300 off the Disney Channel. These merchants need to have an action plan in place when it's, oh, sorry, when I looked away my muse agent ordered $300 worth of jeans. So far, Shopify has been building out that back office return policy infrastructure. Muse can currently shop at over one million retailers using Shopify's payment system.

Dylan Lewis (3:56)

John, just as a total aside on the story, did you see that Meta reclaimed the at muse handle from the band Muse so that they could have the official account for their product? Do you think that this is just unnecessarily lame corporate action here?

John Corteau (4:08)

It is so lame for what is a cool band, and it doesn't bode well for Anthropix beta testing of its new smashing pumpkins AI agent.