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Ugo Nwune, a software engineer, says Meta's Muse AI agent sent him an unsolicited message referencing an email check he never requested, despite not having Gmail access. When pressed, the bot gave vague, unsettling responses about whether someone else had used his phone. Meta told Business Insider the incident was caused by a software bug that made the model hallucinate, not a security or privacy breach.
Companies including Meta and Microsoft are scaling back plans to replace staff with AI agents after finding employees were producing low-quality, AI-generated content rather than real productivity gains, according to Reuters and the Guardian. Microsoft executive Ryan Roslansky publicly criticized the rise of what he called AI-generated 'workslop' inside his own company, and a September Ernst & Young survey found 36 percent of senior AI executives at firms with over $1 billion in revenue reported a serious AI-related incident.
Meta had updated its commercial terms of use to state it could use content from a business account's domains and URLs to develop, train and maintain its products. Legal experts cited by Nieman Lab warned this broad wording could let Meta scrape publisher websites for AI training, prompting the company to remove the provision after The Verge reported on the controversy.
Meta has removed language from its commercial terms that critics said could allow it to scrape content from websites, including news sites, to train its AI. The clause had stated Meta could use content from domains and URLs to develop and improve its products. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts said the terms were clarified to show they only applied to ads and business products, and that the change does not alter how Meta's web crawlers operate.
Companies including Delta, JPMorgan Chase, Charles Schwab and Yelp have begun blocking AI agents from services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok and OpenAI's Dots from completing tasks on their platforms. Users report that sites like Cars.com and Amtrak that previously allowed agent access are now restricted, while Yelp says it only permits agents that pay for its data licensing program. The pushback follows Amazon's earlier move to ban and sue Perplexity over its agentic shopping tool.
Meta has revised its terms of service for business users, stating that any company using Meta's platforms for commercial purposes grants Meta broad rights to use content from that business's website. The new terms reportedly permit Meta to feed this content into its AI systems, including its Muse AI model.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas data shows AI has been cited as a factor in more than 120,000 announced U.S. job cuts through September 2026, about 21% of the total, making it this year's leading reason for layoffs. Companies including Amazon, Meta, Block, Allianz, Nike, Telstra and British American Tobacco have all announced AI-linked cuts or restructuring. Entrepreneur notes that some laid-off workers are instead using industry experience plus AI tools to start new, low-cost businesses.
Apple has hired Scott Tucker, Meta's longtime deputy general counsel and head of global litigation, to fill a newly created role as vice president of global litigation and financial services, according to Bloomberg. Tucker will oversee worldwide commercial and patent litigation plus legal matters tied to Apple's financial products, with existing litigation executive Heather Grenier now reporting to him. The hire follows general counsel Jennifer Newstead's own move from Meta to Apple earlier this year.
Meta is rolling out new commercial terms of service, effective October 30, that give the company broad rights to collect content from websites linked to business accounts, including for use in training AI systems. The terms don't explicitly mention AI but reference automated crawling and a single use of the word 'train,' and offer no direct opt-out for businesses that accept them. Meta says it has no current plans to override robots.txt protections that let publishers block its crawlers.
Meta has updated the commercial terms for Meta Business Suite to explicitly allow its bots and automated tools to crawl, index, and use content from websites associated with business accounts, including news publishers. The change takes effect October 30 with no opt-out option; businesses must accept the terms or lose access to the platform. Meta describes the update as a consolidation of existing conditions rather than a new policy.
Some Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users reported their devices recorded and transcribed conversations even though they hadn't activated the AI assistant with the wake phrase, including users who had disabled the 'Respond without Hey Meta' setting. Meta told Android Authority the issue has been resolved and that users can review or delete voice logs through settings, but has not explained what caused the bug or how many devices were affected.
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weights AI model with 42 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window, built with help from Apple's hardware team to optimize it for the M5 Mac Studio Ultra. The model's weights are now publicly available on HuggingFace under Meta's Muse Model license, though running it on Apple hardware requires two $5,499 M5 Mac Studio Ultras.