Meta is testing a human-assisted system for its personal AI agent, Muse, with contractors handling some phone calls placed through the service. The test was shared internally last week, shortly after the phone-calling feature was launched publicly.
Muse has topped US app download charts since its debut and is designed to perform tasks such as sending emails, shopping and booking travel. Its calling feature allows users to ask Muse to contact US businesses for tasks such as booking haircuts, checking product availability and getting contractor quotes.
The test has raised privacy concerns among employees. Internal posts showed warnings that sensitive information could be unintentionally shared with call-centre contractors.
“It’s baffling to me why we think this feature is worth the risk,” one employee wrote. “We are one bug away from unnecessary information being leaked to human callers.”
Another employee said a Muse call to an internet and cable provider to negotiate a bill included a racist reference by the human contractor.
A vice president in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs acknowledged that “it was a miss” to begin contractor-assisted calls without proper disclosures and said the company had “rolled back this feature” for now. She added that Meta was still “hillclimbing AI calling”. Some tests showed human-assisted calls could achieve success rates of 95% to 98%, compared with the “lower percentage of AI calling.”
She also apologised to the employee and said the “human agent” involved would not work on any Meta projects again.
The test highlights the human labour sometimes used behind autonomous AI systems. It also recalls the earlier “M” assistant experiment, when around 70% of tasks were later estimated to have been completed by humans.
A spokesperson said employee feedback was “overwhelmingly positive” and the test aimed to “get feedback so we can implement safety and privacy protections and improve features before we release them publicly.”
Meta said it would improve the feature with merchants and launch it only with proper disclosures.
Muse has recorded more than 2.5 million downloads. Meta shares have risen more than 20% since its launch, adding over $200 billion in market value, although shares fell 0.6% on Tuesday.
Meta had highlighted Muse’s secure virtual machines and separate storage for sensitive data. Employees said human-assisted calls could weaken that security promise.
The calling feature was tested by employees from August and later expanded to users. Some users reported businesses hanging up after hearing Muse was AI.
The human concierge system was enabled for half of employees last week. Muse could hand requests to trained agents who placed and completed calls. Employees could opt out.
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