The Download

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

TL;DR: The battle of the personal AI agents is heating up, with Meta’s Muse making huge waves this week. For users, the big benefit is that these agents can remove some of the friction from your day (unless they make a mistake, of course). For AI firms: They get data on your entire life.

What happened: If the past few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that instead of swapping phone numbers or business cards, we might soon live in a world where people say, “I’ll have my AI agent reach out to yours.”

These handy robot assistants are all anyone can talk about lately, with Muse now topping the US App Store. But Meta has plenty of rivals vying to be the top personal AI agent in your life, including Siri AI, Google CC, Grok Bot, and a viral text message-based assistant called Instinct. (OpenAI might jump in soon, too, after hiring OpenClaw’s creator earlier this year to “drive the next generation of personal agents.”)

The agent to-do list is growing: The competition has gotten fiercer now that AI can start and finish tasks more proactively. Here are some of the errands people claim their agents have handled:

• Emailing a junk removal company to haul off a fallen tree branch in the yard.
• Haggling their phone bill down by $40 a month.
• Successfully tracking down jumbotron footage of them at the US Open, despite repeatedly being told by the event organizers that the video wasn’t available.
• Noticing that a user qualified for a flight refund, then canceling and rebooking to save them about $550.

In short, bots are apparently dealing with more of the annoying phone calls and other back-and-forths that we dread doing ourselves.

Still, it’s far from perfect—sometimes what’s supposed to be a shortcut just adds friction. Case in point: Resy temporarily banned one Instinct user because the AI kept pinging the platform to nab an in-demand table at a hot restaurant. Other tales of unsettling agent mishaps are piling up, too, making it harder to trust them with truly important tasks.

The agentic data gold mine: For tech companies, the draw of a personal agent is all the precious user data it can collect. That might be why Muse is so eager to suggest you hand over sensitive data (all the better to help you, of course)—like your bank account info, passport and license expiration dates, and even photos of what you eat.

Bottom line: The personal AI agent field is getting crowded, but Meta has the advantage of scale to draw users in (especially given Siri AI still has a waitlist)—and the social media giant’s offering people 100 million free tokens a week to butter them up. —WK

      

Sponsored By America Connects

Loudoun County, Virginia, cut property tax rates by nearly 30%. Here’s how.

In Loudoun County, data centers generate over $1 billion in local tax revenue every year—40% of the county’s total budget and growing. That windfall has let officials cut residential property tax rates by nearly 30% over the past decade, saving Virginians thousands of dollars every year.

All while helping fund new schools and parks, repair roads and bridges, and expand emergency services.

Loudoun County is just one example of the tax revenue benefits data centers offer. Across the country, data centers generate significant local and state tax revenue. And they create thousands of permanent local jobs.

That’s building responsibly.

Get the facts at VirginiaConnects.com.

You can build your very own interactive website with AI

With the weather starting to turn in New York City and the busy part of the work year looming (as well as, well, gestures at the world right now), I’ve found myself daydreaming about the days I spent hiking and just sitting out in nature in Yosemite National Park at the start of this month. I’ve made it a goal to visit all 63 US national parks in my lifetime, but it always feels overwhelming thinking about which one to do next and when (you know, typical ADHD brain).

Just days after that Yosemite trip, I did a tour of meetings at the big AI companies in San Francisco. This gave me the idea to use a chatbot to build my own interactive website for the parks—including everything from which ones are Dark Sky sites (perfect for stargazing), what the highlights of each park are, what the nearest airport is, and which months are the best for visiting (basically, gathering all the info that will be useful to me in one place).

While you don’t have to build your own site for the US national parks, you can use AI to build other useful interactive tools—and share them with friends and family, too.

Here’s the prompt I used to get started:

I want to create an interactive map site with all of the US National Parks on it. Clicking on a park should give information about it, including the best times of year to visit, what it’s famous for, etc. I also want to include whether it’s a Dark Sky site. When I’ve visited one, I want to be able to mark it off (including the things I did there). What else should be included? Is there anything else you need to know before you get started on this?

After this prompt, the chatbot asked me four follow-up questions and gave me a list of additional details it thought would be worth including. We went back and forth a few times throughout the build to get it just right, but overall it took just under two hours (most of this was passive on my end; it spent a lot of time finding good open-license photos to include).

And a bonus: Looking at the map reminded me that I’m very overdue for a diving trip, so I’m now deciding between Biscayne and the Channel Islands. Hey, at least I’ve now narrowed it down to two. —SM

Sponsored By Rocket Lawyer

Read the fine print before it reads you. Contracts are basically legal Mad Libs—one wrong blank and you’re stuck. Rocket Lawyer’s free AI review scans yours in minutes, flags the red flags, and connects you with real attorneys for backup. No law degree required. Know what you’re signing before you sign it. Try it free right now.

The Zeitbyte

The hero all job seekers need

Shannon May

Not all heroes wear capes—some of them prowl LinkedIn to methodically take down droves of fake job scammers. The Profiler (as the man has dubbed himself) says he’s spent the last few years helping remove almost 60,000 phony job listings (and 7,000 scam profiles) from the internet, which are often just a way to swipe job seekers’ cash, identities, and personal data.

According to our friendly neighborhood fake job fighter—a 39-year-old man who’s been looking for a job since 2023—these employment honey pots are getting slicker. Sometimes scammers hijack dormant verified LinkedIn profiles or plant ads on real companies’ verified pages. The goal? Tricking job seekers into paying for résumé “help” or handing over their Social Security numbers. Per The Profiler—who flags these accounts to job search sites—they likely use AI to tailor listings to each target and churn them out at scale.

Given that most of the fake listings our job vigilante found were on LinkedIn—and how angry people online are at the ubiquity of scamming job posts—we can think of one company that might want to hire The Profiler. But, in the meantime, he now offers paid trainings for cybersecurity professionals and even sells merch—including a T-shirt that reads, “I lay off scammers.” —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕☕/5

• Fresh off the Senate hearing yesterday (and plenty of backlash), Flock is finally changing what cops have to enter to search its database.
• Meta’s teen safety team made some eyebrow-raising swag for a company facing a pile of lawsuits—and the lawyers suing Meta aren’t amused.
• Here’s a new trick to try on your landlord: Oracle is blaming forces beyond its control to delay paying rent on a $165 billion data center project that’s moving slowly.
• Few things hurt more than a Gen Alpha insult, and AI users just caught a stray with the newest one.
• Every supervillain has a kryptonite: For Huang, it’s that he doesn’t know these basic facts about his life that most people know by heart.
• Your next online shopping spree just got a sneaky Prime upgrade, even if you aren’t shopping on Amazon.
• Sony might add what new feature to PlayStation controllers soon?!
• In a new interview, Mark Zuckerberg gives a strange, humble-braggy reason for why he wears baggy clothing.

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

This time last week...

Readers’ most-clicked story was about the big Amazon Prime FTC lawsuit. If you didn’t get any money from it last year, there’s hope yet: More consumers are now eligible for a payout—and you could get up to $200.

For our supervillain game in the blurb: Yes, Huang really did compare AI’s effect on the climate to surgery: “In order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first…They’ve got to cut you open to save you.” In other words, AI’s energy demands may accelerate climate change, but could save the planet later. Somewhere, the Joker is nodding in agreement.