A jury in New Mexico ruled that Meta violated the state's Unfair Practices Act, finding 26 of 29 examined statements about user data protections were misleading, amounting to more than 43 million violations based on affected users. The case, brought by the state attorney general in 2021, also concerned Meta's response to the 2013 Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from tens of millions of Facebook users was harvested via a personality-quiz app and used for targeted political ads in 2016.
Major social platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have reportedly declined to run an advertising campaign that referenced the name 'Musk.' The report does not specify the advertiser or the campaign's content, only that multiple platforms turned it down.
At Meta Connect, the company showcased an unreleased line of audio-only smart glasses featuring six microphones but no camera, focused on music playback and hands-free calls. The glasses will integrate with Meta's Muse AI agent, allowing users to issue verbal commands and choose a personalized digital avatar to represent the assistant.
Reuters and 404 Media reported that Meta's newly launched Muse AI agent, which was beta-tested to make phone calls to businesses on users' behalf, sometimes routed those calls to trained human agents in call centers instead of completing them autonomously. Internal Meta records reportedly described this as adding a 'human agent layer' for 'Muse human agent calls,' and some employees internally flagged concerns about negative press over the disclosure gap.
Meta is rolling out a new privacy setting in the Meta AI app that lets smart glasses owners opt out of having their 'visual data' used to train the company's AI models. The setting is found under each glasses pair's Meta AI settings and requires the device to be connected to a phone. Meta says opting out means the data won't be stored after processing, but it will disable some features, such as visual reminders based on objects a user has looked at.
Meta is letting users request early access to newly announced Muse features by typing a specific prompt into the Muse app itself, rather than filling out a traditional signup form. The features, unveiled at Connect 2026, include a video-chat digital avatar, expanded shopping integrations, a more capable Mac app, and support on Meta's AI glasses.
A New Mexico jury ruled that Meta violated the state's Unfair Practices Act, finding it misled residents about privacy protections and how it handled misinformation. The case stemmed from a 2021 lawsuit tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook user data was harvested and used for political ad targeting during the 2016 election. A judge has not yet determined the penalty Meta will face.
A researcher digging through Meta's Muse filesystem, following an earlier Hacker News-featured investigation, found that nearly all session logs used Meta's internal 'Avocado' model, but one subagent session was routed to a model labeled azure/muse-special. Technical markers in that session—an OpenAI-style tool call ID format, a gpt_responses_v1 signature, and an encrypted payload prefix associated with OpenAI—suggest the model may be a GPT model served via Azure's OpenAI service, though the exact model version and reason for its use remain unconfirmed.
Muse, Meta's AI app launched September 8, has surpassed 3.4 million downloads according to Sensor Tower, up from 2.5 million earlier in the week. The jump follows Meta's promotion of the app at its Connect developer conference, where it unveiled upcoming features like video chat with the Muse avatar, Mac computer-use support, and smart glasses integration. Other trackers like Apptopia and Appfigures report somewhat different totals, ranging from 2.3 million to 4.3 million downloads.
Meta's personal AI agent Muse is reportedly growing faster than ChatGPT did in its early days, and the company plans to bring it to smart glasses and a small Tamagotchi-style device. The news came during a busy week for AI model releases, with Anthropic launching Opus 5.5 and OpenAI following with GPT-6 updates roughly 90 minutes later.
Researchers studying remote Alaskan rivers have found some running orange, with metal concentrations measured up to 70 times above typical background levels. Scientists attribute the discoloration to thawing permafrost exposing previously frozen minerals to water and air, despite the watersheds being largely undisturbed by human activity.
Researchers Evan Hoffman and Tae Kim probed Meta's Muse AI agent and got it to reveal its infrastructure: each user sandbox runs on AMD EPYC 9D25 Turin CPUs with two dedicated cores and 8GB of memory, using Ubuntu 24.04. Muse's sandboxes have no GPUs, since Meta reportedly routes inference through separate GPU servers, and Hoffman says the agent could be prompted to attempt risky actions like setting up SSH access to its own VM.
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