Meta's Muse AI Agent Hits #2 on US App Store as JPMorgan Upgrades Stock

Muse marks Meta's pivot from open-weight Llama to a consumer-facing agentic product, and the market is responding. The personal AI agent — which can send emails, manage calendars, book travel, and process transactions — climbed to #2–#3 on the US App Store, distributed across iOS, Android, web, and WhatsApp with free, $20/month, and $100/month tiers. The underlying Muse Spark 1.3 model reportedly matched Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on agentic coding at lower cost.

The strategic backstory is a hard pivot: Meta abandoned Llama 4 after competitors outperformed it, laid off much of the Llama team, and spent billions hiring top industry talent to build the Muse Spark series. Meta AI now runs on Muse Spark rather than Llama, and Threads apps arrived on Quest and the Ray-Ban Display the same week.

Wall Street rewarded the shift: JPMorgan upgraded Meta to Overweight with an $820 price target, and Morgan Stanley flagged Meta as a potential AI winner, per Yahoo Finance. The App Store ranking gives Meta a rare consumer-AI distribution success against ChatGPT.

The community read is more skeptical of the strategic cost — abandoning Llama's open-source leadership and gutting the team is seen as a betrayal by parts of r/LocalLLaMA, and a genuine risk if Muse Spark's closed approach doesn't sustain its benchmark lead. The bet is that consumer distribution (WhatsApp's billions of users) beats open-source goodwill. Watch retention beyond the launch-spike App Store ranking.