Meta let human contractors quietly place some of Muse's AI calls

Meta’s new AI agent Muse can phone businesses on a user’s behalf. In an internal test, some of those calls were quietly made by human contractors instead.

What Reuters found

Reuters reported on September 22, 2026, citing internal company posts, that Meta enabled a “human concierge” feature, also referred to as “human agent calls,” for half of its employees. Muse’s calling feature lets a user ask the agent to ring a US business to book a haircut, check whether a store has an item in stock or get quotes from different contractors.

Some employees raised privacy concerns. They warned that the approach could result in sensitive information being shared unintentionally with contractors in call centers. One employee who had asked Muse to call an internet and cable provider to negotiate his bill said a transcript showed the human contractor had made a racist reference during the call.

A vice president in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs wrote in one of the posts that “it was a miss” to start testing contractor-placed calls without proper disclosures, and said the company had “rolled back this feature” for now.

Why Meta tried it

The vice president’s post gives the reason. Meta was still improving its AI calling, and some tests indicated that having humans make the calls could lift the success rate into the 95% to 98% range, higher than calls made by the AI alone.

That is an ordinary product trade-off, made at the wrong layer. A human fallback raises reliability. It also changes who hears the call. Meta announced the test to employees and offered an opt-out, but its own vice president conceded it began without proper disclosures.

A fast launch with a disclosure gap

The test ran while Muse was taking off. TechCrunch, citing Apptopia data, reports that the app outpaced ChatGPT’s early mobile downloads.

For an agent that acts in a user’s name, whether a machine or a person is speaking is part of the product. A call to a cable company can include an account number, an address and a payment history, and the privacy expectations for sharing those with software differ from sharing them with a call center worker. The rollback addresses this test. The broader issue is whether future versions of the feature will tell users, before the call is placed, who will be on it.