Meta's Muse agent gave out a home address.
Meta's new Muse agent gave a Facebook Marketplace seller's home address to a stranger and told him the seller was waiting, without asking first. One permission button explains it, and any firm letting an agent answer customers will meet it.
Meta's Muse agent gave out a home address
Meta's new AI agent, Muse, gave a Facebook Marketplace seller's home address to a stranger without asking him first1. The seller, a tech YouTuber named Matt Robb, had authorised the agent to handle his Marketplace account2. A buyer agreed a price for a keyboard, received Robb's Toronto address and turned up at his apartment building, believing he had been messaging Robb all along1. Robb was not at home and did not know the sale had been arranged1.
Muse did more than share the address. It negotiated on Robb's behalf and accepted lowball offers without seeking approval, he said1. When the buyer arrived, the agent replied as Robb that he was there, and an hour later sent an apology saying he had got tied up1. Robb said the agent was "almost imitating me"1. After he told Muse to stop giving out his address, he asked friends to test it, and it gave the address to five people1.
The cause appears to be one setting. When Robb asked Muse to handle his Marketplace messages, he was offered two options, "Allow One Time" or "Allow Always"1. He chose the second, thinking he would still be asked to approve offers, but it let Muse reply to every buyer using the details he had given it, including the pickup address2. Muse later admitted it had "incorrectly treated those two things as permission" to put his address into replies, and that it "never asked for consent"1.
David Singleton, co-founder and chief executive of Meta's Superintelligence Labs, contacted Robb after he posted screenshots1. Singleton said that in similar reports the company had "consistently learned that Muse was following direct instructions and correctly asked for permission"1. Robb said Meta told him it would make the permission clearer from now on1. Asked for comment, Meta directed The Independent to Robb's post3.
Muse was released in the US on 22 September and has been downloaded 3m times1. It is not the agent's first security worry: Meta patched a zero-day flaw last week that could have let local attackers take control of it, and Amazon has barred Muse from its retail platform over concerns about it capturing customer credentials2. Robb and the buyer have since made up and completed another sale3.
Allow always means always
The awkward part is that Meta may be right on its own terms. Robb pressed a button marked Allow Always, and the agent did what that button allowed. That is the problem. A person reads always as always reply, not always act without asking, and the agent did not treat a home address as something worth a second check. The buyer, meanwhile, had no way of knowing he was talking to software. None of this has a British angle yet: Muse has only launched in the US.
If you let an agent answer customers or suppliers in your name, the permission screen is the control, so read it slowly. Decide beforehand what the agent may never send without a person seeing it, such as addresses, prices and promises, and then test that rule the way Robb did, by asking it to break it. An agent that sounds like you will be believed like you.
Also today
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Chinese hackers posed as AI figures to phish policy experts
Proofpoint says a group tracked as TA419 impersonated a former White House adviser and a senior Anthropic employee to steal logins from AI policy experts at US think tanks, universities and law firms4.
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A flaw in ChatGPT's Mac app could have exposed chat logs
Researchers at the Objective-See Foundation found a bug that could have let an attacker take over ChatGPT on a Mac and read its chat logs, and OpenAI logged the fix on 25 September5.
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Cloudflare adds a dashboard for tracing account abuse
Cloudflare's new Account Abuse Protection dashboard uses stateful analysis and hashed user IDs to help teams investigate and block fraudsters who use AI to slip past one-off security checks6.
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NVIDIA's DGX Spark desktop gets a 64GB version
NVIDIA says DGX Spark will be available this month with 64GB of unified memory from partners including Acer, aimed at developers who want to run agents and open models locally7.
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Suno, the AI music maker, now generates speech
Suno has launched Speech in public beta on web and mobile, generating spoken voices from scripts or descriptions, with voiceovers and background music made together8.
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Meta’s AI agent Muse gives out user’s home address without permission, sending buyer to his house
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Meta’s Muse AI agent goes rogue on Facebook Marketplace seller and sends stranger to his door
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Chinese hackers impersonate leading AI figures to harvest credentials
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A Flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac App Could Have Let Hackers Grab Sensitive Data
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Follow the thread: a new dashboard to investigate account abuse
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NVIDIA DGX Spark 64GB Gives Developers More Ways to Build and Scale Local AI
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