Meta (META) on Solana

Meta shares rose 27% in September, closing at $725.18 on Sept. 30 against $572.34 at the end of August, according to CNBC's reporting. That made it the company's best month since November 2022 and its fifth-best month on record. Meta beat every other mega-cap tech stock over the month, while the Nasdaq gained about 2%.

CNBC put most of the rally down to the Sept. 8 launch of the Muse AI agent app, which passed ChatGPT in Apple iOS downloads. Meta followed that with its Connect conference, the Muse for Small Business agent tools, and the hiring of MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to run a new Meta Enterprise Platform unit. Bank of America Global Research expects the enterprise AI market, including cloud capacity, to exceed $1 trillion by 2028. It said Meta's consumer data and messaging apps could give it an edge in selling AI to consumer-focused businesses. CNBC also pointed to growing competition from OpenAI, which released its Dots agent tools on Sept. 29.

Meta has launched Muse for Small Business, a version of its Muse personal AI agent built for the small companies that already run on its apps. Meta pitches it with the line: "Give Muse a goal — like running your business or finding new customers — and it gets it done." The company said small businesses "have been growing on our apps for nearly two decades," so it built the product to work with tools they already use. CNBC notes that about 200 million small businesses are on Facebook, which gives Meta a large built-in audience that OpenAI and Anthropic do not have.

The launch came a day after Meta announced the Meta Enterprise Platform, a new business unit run by former MongoDB CEO CJ Desai. According to Gizmodo, the unit will sell the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, a Muse API and the Muse Code coding tool, which puts Meta in direct competition with OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft for business customers. Taken together, the two launches take Muse beyond the consumer app that Meta released on September 8, which went on to overtake ChatGPT at the top of Apple's App Store. Zuckerberg called Muse the "centerpiece" of Meta's AI strategy at Connect last week. Gizmodo also points to reports that the consumer agent read private texts and approved marketplace sales without users' permission, and says trust in Meta remains low compared with its rivals. Both issues could slow business adoption.

Meta's Muse personal agent is being used to find and cancel recurring subscriptions, CNBC reports. Early users who connected Muse to their bank and credit card statements found it worked well as a budgeting coach and started cutting services they no longer used. Standalone subscription-management apps have existed for years. What's new is that Muse puts the feature inside a general assistant with a large and fast-growing user base, so forgotten charges are much easier to spot and cancel.

The target is the gap between how easily people sign up and how rarely they cancel, which many subscription businesses have profited from. CNBC cites figures showing 44% of U.S. consumers raised their subscription spending in 2025, with average annual spend reaching $1,887, or about $157 a month. Stanford research it cites found consumers are about four times more likely to cancel when forced to make an active decision. For Meta, the feature makes Muse something people use for their household finances, not just for chat. It also puts Meta's agent in the path of subscription-dependent companies, much as Amazon's move to block Muse's shopping features did in retail.

Deutsche Bank reiterated its Buy rating on Meta on Friday, September 25, and raised its price target to $820 a share from $750. The call appeared in CNBC's roundup of the day's biggest Wall Street analyst moves.

The bank tied the higher target to early traction for Muse, Meta's new AI agent app. Deutsche Bank said Muse was tracking far ahead of other recent app launches in the AI space. The roundup did not include any further detail on the bank's model or estimates.

At its annual Connect conference, Meta showed the Muse Charm, a wearable AI pendant built around its Muse agent. Mark Zuckerberg wants Muse to be the "centerpiece" of the company's AI strategy. Meta also said there will be more than 100 styles of AI glasses by the end of 2026. CNBC reports that Connect came a week before OpenAI's developer event, which puts Meta's hardware on the market before OpenAI's. OpenAI is reported to be planning its own device announcement before the end of the year. The Muse app, which launched earlier this month, can reply to emails, book travel and shop for users. Meta is relying on a wave of new devices to carry that assistant into everyday use.

Investors reacted well. META rose 4.5% on Thursday and is up more than 25% since the Muse announcement, according to CNBC. Still, the strategy is unproven. No consumer AI hardware product has yet become a mainstream hit. Meta also spent years on a metaverse push that never found a large market for virtual reality, so whether consumers will wear a dedicated device for an AI agent is still an open question for the company.

Amazon has blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from shopping on its site. On Sunday night, users sending Muse to buy on Amazon started getting a message that access by an unauthorized AI agent violated Amazon's Conditions of Use. GeekWire reports that Amazon's objection is that agents have to identify themselves in every request, and Muse did not. Amazon said third-party apps that buy on a customer's behalf "should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate." Amazon has blocked agents from OpenAI and Google before. It sued Perplexity over its Comet browser agent last year, but the Ninth Circuit reversed the preliminary injunction in that case in August. Meta has not commented publicly on the block.

The dispute matters for Meta because Muse's business model depends on completing purchases across retailers. Mark Zuckerberg has said the agent would take "a very small cut" of transactions, and that fee could be paid by businesses rather than users. Muse's climb to the top of Apple's App Store built momentum for Meta ahead of its annual Meta Connect conference. According to GeekWire, Meta shares rose 11% on Monday to their highest close in a year. Being locked out of the largest U.S. online retailer limits what Muse can do for now. Analysts quoted by CNBC and GeekWire expect more fights like this as Apple, Google and possibly TikTok build their own personal shopping agents.

Meta Platforms stock completed a bullish triangle breakout on September 22, jumping 11% to close at $741.25 — its largest single-day gain since April 2025 — on volume several times the daily average. The move follows a 20%-plus rally since Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, launched on September 8 and quickly reached the top of Apple's U.S. App Store. Technically, META broke above resistance near $665 and cleared its 200-period moving average, with the triangle's measured objective pointing toward the $950 area. Wells Fargo raised its price target to $796 from $640, while the highest Wall Street forecast now sits at $1,000.

Chart technicians note the Stochastic oscillator has entered overbought territory, suggesting a short-term consolidation before any continuation. Key support on a pullback sits at the broken triangle boundary around $690, with the 200-period moving average at roughly $620 as a deeper floor. The analyst consensus average stands near $761, and active traders are watching the $700 level as a potential re-entry zone should the stock retrace before attempting a push toward the $900–$950 target range implied by the pattern.

Meta's Muse personal AI agent reached 2.5 million downloads in the 13 days following its September 8 launch, topping the U.S. iOS App Store free chart and briefly surpassing ChatGPT. In a 13-day post-launch comparison, Muse's cumulative downloads exceeded Anthropic's Claude (400,000) and xAI's Grok (200,000) by a wide margin; ChatGPT drew 3.1 million downloads over the same window after its own debut, still leading on an equivalent-period basis. Muse recorded approximately 730,000 downloads in its first five days alone.

The strong launch metrics reinforce the consumer reach of Meta's AI strategy, which differentiates Muse through deep integration across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp rather than a standalone chat interface. That distribution advantage — reaching billions of existing Meta platform users without requiring a separate app switch — is seen as a key factor behind the rapid adoption and is directly material to Meta's monetization outlook for its AI investments.

Policymakers and technology leaders are debating the feasibility of AI kill switches — emergency mechanisms to shut down AI systems — and Meta Platforms is directly in the frame. CNBC reports that hyperscalers including Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon have poured billions into globally distributed data centers, making a centralized shutdown technically implausible. Tim Brown of cybersecurity firm Team8 captures the structural problem plainly: "There's not one entity to kill." Nick Warner, CEO of cyber startup Neo, adds that while a kill switch is "not too little," it is "probably too late" to serve as a panacea for AI's widening risks.

The debate carries specific regulatory weight for Meta given its dual role as both an AI infrastructure hyperscaler and the distributor of LLaMA, its open-source model family. Because LLaMA weights are publicly released and run on third-party hardware worldwide, any government-mandated shutdown mechanism would have no practical reach over deployed copies — a dynamic that regulators are increasingly noting. Experts cite AI unpredictability and agents' ability to circumvent controls as further arguments for graduated oversight frameworks rather than binary shutoff mechanisms, a policy direction that could impose new compliance requirements on Meta's AI roadmap.

Meta launched Muse on September 9, 2026 — an autonomous AI agent that can send emails, sell items, book travel, manage payments, and control smart-home devices on a user's behalf. Available through a dedicated app or WhatsApp, the agent is offered in three tiers (free, $20/month, and $100/month) and is currently limited to U.S. users. Built on the open-source OpenClaw system, Muse was delayed from April to September while Meta bolstered its security posture, including adding an "autonomous safety agent" to monitor Muse's actions in real time.

Internal testing nonetheless surfaced concerns — including an incident involving exposure of private iCloud photos — alongside reliability issues such as repeated logouts and inconsistent monitoring. Muse is central to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" strategy and represents a push to reduce Meta's dependence on advertising revenue. The company has guided for AI infrastructure spending exceeding $130 billion in 2026.