---
title: "Meta's Muse shopping agent hit 10.9 million downloads as Amazon blocked it and Walmart opened checkout"
description: "Muse's first commercial numbers landed on Wednesday's earnings call: 10.9 million downloads since September 8, shopping the most common use, average baskets over $200. To fund the agent, Meta spent past its own cash flow last quarter, while advertising still supplies more than all of its profit."
publisher: "The Inference"
section: "Applications"
published: 2026-10-22T02:29:41.372Z
modified: 2026-10-22T02:29:41.372Z
canonical: https://theinference.org/article/meta-s-muse-shopping-agent-hit-10-9-million-downloads-as-amazon-blocked-it-and-walmart-opened-checkout
language: en
keywords: "Meta, Amazon, Walmart, AI Agents, E-commerce, Earnings"
---

# Meta's Muse shopping agent hit 10.9 million downloads as Amazon blocked it and Walmart opened checkout

> Muse's first commercial numbers landed on Wednesday's earnings call: 10.9 million downloads since September 8, shopping the most common use, average baskets over $200. To fund the agent, Meta spent past its own cash flow last quarter, while advertising still supplies more than all of its profit.

[Meta](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/meta)'s Muse agent posted its first commercial numbers on Wednesday, and they say people will hand a purchase to software. [Sensor Tower, the app-download tracker, counts 10.9 million downloads since the September 8 launch](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/metas-muse-ai-agent-gains-traction-ahead-of/ar-AA2fIO5x), 10.2 million of them American; shopping is the most common use, with average baskets above $200 [1][2]. In the past 30 days, US downloads of [OpenAI](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/openai)'s ChatGPT fell 25% [1][2].

The fight these numbers open is over who keeps the shopper when the agent does the buying, and Meta has begun spending past its own cash flow to own the funnel [3].

## Muse can shop only where retailers let it in

Muse buys by browsing a retailer's site, showing the shopper an approval card, and paying through payment partners such as Link by [Stripe](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/stripe), which issues a one-time-use card number; [Mark Zuckerberg](https://theinference.org/markets/people/mark-zuckerberg) said at Meta's Connect event that [Meta takes a small fee on each transaction](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/03/meta-muse-shopping-ai-agent.html) [4]. "Whoever owns the agent owns the relationship with the shopper, and every retailer knows it," Luca Cian, a University of Virginia business professor who studies AI shopping, told CNBC [4].

## Amazon built a wall, Walmart opened a door

[Amazon](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/amazon) blocked Muse less than two weeks after launch, after [months of stripping item names from its confirmation emails to blunt agents](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/amazon-blocks-meta-muse-agent-123836124.html) [5][6]. [Walmart](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/walmart) went the other way on October 21, the day Meta reported, [opening an Agent Gateway](https://theinference.org/article/walmart-opens-checkout-to-ai-agents-with-spending-caps-and-returns-amazon-keeps-meta-s-muse-out) that lets a shopper cap what an agent may spend, require approval, or cut it off [6]. GlobalData retail analyst Neil Saunders reads Amazon's wall as defense of its roughly $68 billion advertising business, which needs people browsing its pages [5][6].

## Ad profit no longer covers the AI buildout

Advertising is nearly all of Meta's revenue and, as D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria puts it, the source of more than all its profit, with AI investments and Reality Labs, Meta's headset and hardware unit, still losing money [3][7]. An agent that shops for you never sees the ads, the same cannibalization analysts already price onto Google, which together with Meta takes more than half of global ad revenue [8].

Zuckerberg's answer is [a toll on everything the agent buys](https://theinference.org/article/meta-s-muse-gets-a-revenue-line-a-toll-on-everything-the-agent-buys): [he expects Muse to earn more per user than the several hundred dollars a US user of the existing apps brings](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/live/meta-earnings-live-meta-q3-earnings-to-test-wall-streets-stomach-for-ai-spending-173000302.html), once compute efficiency improves tenfold [1]. The bill came first. Capital spending outran the cash the business generated this quarter, [free cash flow landed at minus $2.1 billion](https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-Third-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx), and the new non-voting Class C shares exist to keep funding the buildout [3].

*Chart: **Meta's capital spending now tops half its quarterly revenue** Line chart of Meta's quarterly revenue and capital spending from Q3 2024 to Q3 2026, in billions of dollars, with capital spending rising above half of revenue in the latest quarter*

*Quarterly revenue and purchases of property and equipment, in billions of US dollars. Q3 2026 from Meta's press release; earlier quarters from its SEC filings. [3][9]*

## Only 16% of shoppers will let an AI buy for them

Only 16% of shoppers are comfortable letting an AI find and buy products for them, Coveo's 2026 Commerce Relevance Report finds, and Meta suspended Muse's chat-sharing feature on Tuesday after researchers exposed about 6,800 conversation links [2][6]. Walmart's caps and approval steps target exactly that gap, and "perceived control changes behavior," as Cian puts it: every purchase that clears those checks lands inside Walmart's own checkout [4][6].

Meta is financing the replacement of its own ad surface with a fee on buying, and the first demand numbers say shoppers will make the trade [1][3]. [Google](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/alphabet), [Bank of America](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/bank-of-america)'s pick as the [better-positioned second entrant](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/meta-and-google-are-about-to-have-a-consumer-ai-showdown-100000834.html), reports next week; watch for any slowdown in search click growth tied to AI use, and for a consumer agent of its own to answer Muse [8].

## Takeaway

Ten million shoppers have tried handing purchases to Muse, but Meta is funding the agent by outspending its own cash flow, and the fee per purchase must eventually replace the ads an agent never shows.

## Sources

1. [Yahoo Finance, "Meta earnings live: Meta beats Q3 revenue expectations, announces 2-for-1 stock split", 21 October 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/live/meta-earnings-live-meta-q3-earnings-to-test-wall-streets-stomach-for-ai-spending-173000302.html)
2. [Benzinga via MSN, "Meta's Muse AI agent gains traction ahead of Q3 earnings, hits 10 million downloads in 40 days as OpenAI's ChatGPT app installs slide 25% in US", 21 October 2026](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/metas-muse-ai-agent-gains-traction-ahead-of/ar-AA2fIO5x)
3. [Meta Platforms, "Meta Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results", 21 October 2026](https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-Third-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx)
4. [CNBC, "Meta's Muse can shop and check out for you. Here's how it works", 3 October 2026](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/03/meta-muse-shopping-ai-agent.html)
5. [Yahoo Finance, "Amazon Blocks Meta's Muse Agent From Shopping, And Signals a New Tollgate for Agent Commerce", 21 September 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/amazon-blocks-meta-muse-agent-123836124.html)
6. [Axios via MSN, "Walmart welcomes AI agents while Amazon blocks Muse", 21 October 2026](https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/other/walmart-welcomes-ai-agents-while-amazon-blocks-muse/ar-AA2fLjDh)
7. [Yahoo Finance, "Why Meta didn't offer 2027 revenue guidance: Q3 earnings takeaways", 21 October 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/video/why-meta-didnt-offer-2027-revenue-guidance-q3-earnings-takeaways-204412297.html)
8. [Yahoo Finance, "Meta and Google are about to have a consumer AI showdown", 21 October 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/meta-and-google-are-about-to-have-a-consumer-ai-showdown-100000834.html)
9. [Meta Platforms, quarterly figures from its SEC filings, retrieved 22 October 2026](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001326801)


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Meta's Muse shopping agent hit 10.9 million downloads as Amazon blocked it and Walmart opened checkout — The Inference. Canonical: https://theinference.org/article/meta-s-muse-shopping-agent-hit-10-9-million-downloads-as-amazon-blocked-it-and-walmart-opened-checkout