Meta is opening an early access program for new capabilities coming to its Muse AI assistant, giving users a direct way to test features before they are released broadly as the company accelerates its push to turn AI from a conversational tool into an agent capable of taking actions across devices and services.
The company announced the program on Friday, days after unveiling a broader set of Muse upgrades at its Connect 2026 developer conference. Rather than limiting early testing to randomly selected users, Meta is actively seeking people who want to experiment with the assistant’s newest capabilities.
Users can ask Muse to register their interest in the program through a simple prompt shared by Meta on X: “Can you let the Muse team know I want to be part of the Muse early access program?”
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This approach gives Meta a pool of users likely to be highly engaged with AI products and familiar with competing assistants. That matters as the consumer AI market becomes increasingly crowded with products that are moving beyond answering questions toward completing tasks on behalf of users.
Traditional technology companies frequently use randomized A/B testing to measure how different groups respond to new features. Meta’s approach serves a different purpose. By attracting AI enthusiasts who actively want early access, the company can put new agentic functions in the hands of users who are more likely to test their limits, compare them with rival products, and identify where they work or fail.
For Meta, that feedback is necessary as Muse gains access to more parts of a user’s digital life.
From Chatbot To Digital Agent
The features Meta previewed at Connect suggest that Muse is being developed as more than another AI chatbot.
Among the additions is a digital avatar that users will eventually be able to interact with through video conversations. Meta is also expanding shopping partnerships and connectors, potentially giving Muse access to more services that users rely on for everyday transactions.
The company’s Mac application is also being expanded. Meta said Muse will soon be able to use a computer to complete various tasks, a development that moves the product closer to the emerging category of computer-use agents.
A conventional AI assistant primarily generates information or content in response to a prompt. An agent is expected to interpret an objective, interact with software and services, and complete multiple steps with less intervention from the user.
Meta has already been positioning Muse in that direction, with capabilities that allow it to handle tasks such as email, shopping, and travel bookings. The new desktop capabilities could significantly broaden the range of activities the assistant can perform because a computer provides access to applications and websites that may not have dedicated integrations.
The expansion of connectors is similarly important. The more external services Muse can interact with, the more useful it can become as a general-purpose assistant. But that also increases the importance of permissions, authentication, privacy, and safeguards because an agent capable of acting across multiple services can potentially make consequential decisions rather than simply provide information.
AI Glasses Bring Muse into The Physical World
Meta is also extending Muse to its AI glasses, allowing users to interact with the assistant through voice.
The integration could become one of the more consequential parts of Meta’s AI strategy because glasses provide a different interface from smartphones and computers. Users can access an assistant while walking, shopping, or carrying out other activities without having to stop and look at a screen.
The combination of wearable hardware and an agentic assistant also gives Meta an opportunity to connect AI more closely with the user’s surroundings.
A voice request made through glasses can potentially become the starting point for an agent that retrieves information, communicates with another service, or performs a task through a connected device. That creates a different proposition from simply asking a chatbot a question.
It also gives Meta a reason to develop Muse across its broader hardware ecosystem rather than treating the application as a standalone product.
The decision to recruit users directly for early access comes as AI companies increasingly compete on how quickly they can improve agents in real-world environments.
Agentic systems are difficult to develop solely through conventional laboratory testing because their performance depends on unpredictable interactions with websites, applications, users, and third-party services. A feature that works in a controlled demonstration can encounter very different conditions when deployed at scale.
An early-access community can therefore provide Meta with a continuous stream of real-world feedback before features reach the wider user base. The strategy also has a competitive dimension. AI enthusiasts are among the users most likely to experiment with several competing assistants. Getting those users into Muse early gives Meta an opportunity to make the product part of their daily workflows before rival agents become entrenched.
Meta has an unusually large distribution advantage because Muse can potentially be connected to an ecosystem spanning Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and the company’s hardware products. The challenge is converting that distribution into regular use of an AI agent rather than simply exposing billions of users to another chatbot.
The new features point toward Meta’s answer: make Muse useful in situations where users need something done, rather than simply something explained.
Shopping integrations, computer control, voice access and wearable devices all move in that direction.
The early access program is consequently more than a conventional beta-testing exercise. It gives Meta a mechanism to place its evolving agent in the hands of sophisticated users while it works out how much autonomy people actually want from an AI assistant, which tasks they are willing to delegate, and where they expect human control to remain.