One month after Meta launched Muse, this personal agent quickly gained popularity, prompting a group of companies to collaborate on simplifying the process of bringing this technology into the business world.

Meta, Walmart, Stripe, and several other companies are releasing what they call the Personal Agent Protocol. This is an open standard designed to define how AI agents interact with businesses. Enterprise AI startup Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is also part of the group. Taylor, who is also OpenAI's chairman, is leading this initiative. In an interview, he said businesses still have a lot of work to do to figure out how and when personal agents can access information. "Companies will be able to know whether the other party is a personal agent or a real person. For many companies, there's a risk: you don't want a random bot that isn't acting on behalf of someone to be able to access the service," Taylor said. "Before this standard exists, things are indeed a bit chaotic."

Since its release in early September, Meta's Muse has become the most popular and widely discussed personal AI agent. It soared to the top of Apple's App Store and has stayed there, ahead of ChatGPT. However, companies like Amazon have blocked Meta's agent, citing concerns about website scraping. Amazon also blocked Perplexity's AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging it took steps to "hide" the AI agent so it could continue scraping Amazon's website without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a "bullying tactic."

Regarding the new standard, Taylor compared it to the experience of logging into other websites with Google or Facebook credentials, a technology he helped develop when he was a tech executive at Facebook. He said this approach would help with identity verification, let businesses know they are dealing with a bot, and make visible what personal agents are actually doing through these websites. David Singleton, vice president of engineering and consumer products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former head of technology at Stripe, emphasized security. He said that for agents to function well, customers need to share credit card and personal information, and the new standard creates a certain level of visibility and control. "We are defining the rails that we hope both personal agents and business agents will run on in the future," Singleton said, comparing it to email. "Think about email—it works well because it's a standard everyone can use to communicate with each other, and we think this will be very similar."

Singleton said Muse already has millions of users in the United States and is "growing rapidly." "We've found that people like to use Muse for all sorts of things, like signing their kids up for classes, finding and buying the best gifts, booking that dentist appointment you've been putting off for six months," he said. "We need a mechanism to make it faster and smoother."

Although OpenAI and Anthropic have not yet joined, Taylor said he expects these AI giants to participate, and said he would be "very disappointed" if competitors don't use it. "The whole point of this is to be an open standard," Taylor said.