Meta Jumps 11% as Its Muse Agent Wins a Shopify Deal and an Amazon Block

Meta Platforms shares climbed more than 11% on Monday to close at $741.25, the stock’s best day in over a year. That single session added about $75 a share, and the catalyst was a two-week-old app. Investors are wagering that Muse, the personal assistant Meta launched this month, becomes a business.

An app that climbed past ChatGPT

Muse arrived on September 8 as a free download, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month for heavier use. It is built to do things rather than answer questions, booking an appointment or working through a shopping list on a user’s behalf. Consumers took to it quickly. Within two weeks it had climbed to the top of Apple’s U.S. free-app chart, ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to reporting from Reuters and from Barron’s, the latter citing app-tracking data from Sensor Tower. Wall Street noticed. Several analysts turned more positive on the stock Monday, and Wells Fargo reiterated an overweight rating, with the enthusiasm circling one question: whether a free assistant this popular can be turned into revenue.

A deal at Shopify, a block at Amazon

Muse’s commerce push drew opposite reactions from two giants of online retail. Shopify agreed to let the agent browse its merchants’ stores and complete purchases through Shop Pay, its one-tap checkout, in a partnership both companies confirmed this week. Amazon went the other way. It began blocking Muse from buying on its site over the weekend, after Meta declined a request to pull the agent, and said the bot had accessed the store without identifying itself as software. By Amazon’s account, Muse also stored shoppers’ login credentials in a way that broke its terms of use, a claim that fed wider warnings from banks about fraud and privacy risks as shopping bots spread. Meta’s chief executive framed the Shopify tie-up as the first of several and said more retail partnerships were on the way. That split marks an early fault line in how retailers will treat AI agents that shop on behalf of their owners.

A stock already running hot

Monday’s jump landed on top of a strong run. Meta had gained 35.8% over the prior 30 days, and Monday’s close set a fresh 90-day high, 8.6% above its earlier peak for the period and 37.5% above its 90-day low. Volume backed the move: 48.7 million shares traded, about 2.6 times the 20-day average. The rally also lifted chipmakers whose processors run agent software, with Arm up more than 17%, Intel up 12% and Qualcomm up 9% on the day.

On the calendar

The next test comes fast. Meta holds its annual Connect event on September 23 and 24 at its Menlo Park campus, with the main keynote set for Wednesday evening, and Muse is expected to feature alongside the company’s wider AI plans. The details investors will hunt for are usage figures and any word on how Meta intends to make money from the agent. Whether more retailers follow Shopify or Amazon will take longer to settle.

This is a general-market summary for information only — not investment advice, and not a recommendation regarding any security.