Meta's Muse AI agent is an early hit at Connect, but Zuckerberg's answers leave gaps

Meta kicked off its Connect conference this week, and the early standout is software: the company's new Muse AI agent. According to The Verge, Muse "appears to be an early hit," and the assessment is firsthand — the host of The Verge's Decoder podcast has been using the agent and called it "surprisingly good." CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent the week on an interview tour to press the moment.

The interview Zuckerberg didn't give

The Verge asked Zuckerberg to appear on Decoder to discuss the announcements; Meta declined the request. Instead, the latest Decoder episode works through a lengthy conversation Zuckerberg gave to Alex Heath, a former Verge colleague, pausing along the way to flag gaps in the CEO's answers that other interviewers should press on. Two subjects dominate: the recording indicator on Meta's smart glasses and the company's recent multibillion-dollar teen safety settlement.

Phones, glasses and passive recording

On the glasses, Zuckerberg told Heath that Meta feels "quite good about the product," arguing that phones carry no recording light either, yet people record each other with them constantly. The Decoder host pushes back hard on that comparison. Recording someone with a phone means taking it out, opening the camera app and holding it up — a physical act that announces intent and lets others react. Glasses with a camera built into the temple remove that signal; a small light, if noticed at all, is not the same thing.

The deeper critique is about framing. As The Verge sees it, the tech industry would like passive surveillance devices — from Flock cameras and Ring doorbells to Meta Glasses — sorted into the same mental category as smartphones, so that nobody has to ask what new social etiquette they demand. But smartphones themselves forced society to construct a new set of rules around recording, a tension that ran through the Black Lives Matter era of police recordings. The question The Verge wants asked directly: if always-on recording could be rebooted in a form factor that makes capturing people easier and more passive, which norms would you change?

A problem Meta already knows about

Zuckerberg's defense is essentially educational. The glasses shipped with the recording light from the very first version, he says, but millions of people have bought them since launch and never absorbed the original messaging, so Meta now needs to re-communicate how the device works. The Verge's counterargument is that this misses the point: users define products regardless of manufacturer intent, just as Twitter users invented the hashtag and the @-reply that the company only later adopted. Telling more people what the light means will not stop bad actors.

And Meta already has internal evidence of misuse. According to The Verge, the company knows the glasses are being used to harass retail workers and women, and it has begun down-ranking those videos on Instagram to reduce the incentive to make them. Whether moderation-style incentives can actually curb misuse of a camera, given Meta's own contested history with content moderation, is a follow-up nobody has answered.

The teen safety settlement

The other open front is teen safety. Zuckerberg conceded that Meta could have explained along the way how seriously it took those issues, but didn't, because heavy usage seemed to show that people still liked the products. The Verge notes the lawsuits allege the products are addictive, and that the Big Tobacco comparison exists precisely because something can be enjoyable, heavily used and harmful at the same time. Usage rates, in other words, say nothing about whether harm is occurring.

Why it matters

Muse's warm reception hands Meta real momentum coming out of Connect, but the Decoder episode is a reminder that the company's biggest launches now arrive bundled with unresolved questions about surveillance norms, harassment and teen safety. Zuckerberg is giving plenty of interviews this week; the substance behind the answers is the part still missing. How Meta handles glasses misuse and the settlement's aftermath will go a long way toward deciding whether Muse's early goodwill survives contact with reality.