Meta and Sierra announced an open standard Tuesday for how personal AI agents deal with businesses, as some websites block Meta's Muse app despite an estimated 5 million downloads.
Key Points:
- Meta and Sierra are developing the Personal Agent Protocol, with a first specification due later this month.
- Users report that Yelp, eBay and several airlines turn away AI agents, and Amazon has blocked Muse since Sept. 20.
- Sensor Tower estimates Muse crossed 5 million downloads 22 days after its Sept. 8 launch.
Personal Agent Protocol Details
Sierra co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor announced the Personal Agent Protocol in a company blog post, naming Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart as industry partners. A first specification, version 0.1, is due later this month. The standard is meant to handle authentication and show companies what an agent does on their websites, through their software interfaces or in conversation with their own AI agents.
Sessions run on OAuth, an existing authorization standard, and customers decide whether an agent gets read-only or write access once they sign in to their accounts. Payments are not part of the first version.
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Muse Blocks, Tony Bates
The effort follows complaints from users who say sites including Yelp, eBay and several airlines turned their agents away, in some cases through anti-bot measures designed to stop spam. Walmart, a Muse partner, said its blocks were unintentional. Delta said it has no partnership that lets a third-party agent book its flights, while Yelp said it bars non-human traffic unless an agent pays for its data licensing program.
Amazon has blocked Muse from its retail site since Sept. 20.
Genesys Chief Executive Tony Bates said personal AI is "creating a new front door to the enterprise" and that brands need a trusted way to know whom an agent represents.
Meta argued in its own announcement that a business rejecting an agent is also rejecting the customer who sent it, and said it prefers to resolve companies' concerns with them. Stripe and Shopify already belong to a rival agent protocol run by Visa.
Meta Muse Downloads
Meta launched Muse in the U.S. on Sept. 8 as a personal agent that can send emails, book travel, fill out forms and make purchases on a user's behalf. Two days later it reached No. 2 on Apple's U.S. App Store with more than 83,000 iOS downloads, a slower start than Threads or Meta AI, Sensor Tower data showed.
The app overtook ChatGPT as the top free iPhone app on Sept. 18. Sensor Tower estimated it crossed 5 million downloads on Sept. 30, 22 days after launch, a mark that took ChatGPT 56 days to reach.
The firm said Meta's own advertising likely helped, with Muse taking up to 50% of the company's daily house-ad impressions over two weeks in September.
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