Meta quietly tested human callers behind AI assistant Muse after merchants hung up
Meta had human contractors quietly place calls for its new AI assistant Muse after businesses hung up on the AI — and has now rolled the test back amid employee privacy concerns, Reuters reports.
Meta tested having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed by its new personal AI assistant Muse, after businesses called by the AI agent hung up once they realised the caller was not human, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing internal company posts and a Meta spokesperson.
According to the posts, Meta told employees about the “human concierge” test last week, shortly after it added a phone-calling feature to Muse — but later ended the test for now. Some employees warned it could lead to users’ sensitive information being shared unintentionally with contractors in call centres, and said it could undercut the security measures Meta promoted when it launched the assistant. PYMNTS reports the test began after some Muse users said merchants often hung up when they realised the caller was AI.
A Meta spokesperson, Daniel Roberts, said the company ran the test to gather feedback before releasing features publicly, adding that employee response was “overwhelmingly positive”. “We’re working with merchants to continue improving this potential calling feature, and will only roll it out when it’s ready and with the proper disclosures,” he said.
A vice president in Meta’s SuperIntelligence Labs unit acknowledged in one of the posts that “it was a miss” to start testing the contractor-placed calls without proper disclosures, and said the company had “rolled back this feature” for now — though some tests suggested human-placed calls could push success rates to 95–98%, versus a lower percentage for AI calling.
The episode echoes Meta’s earlier “M” assistant experiment on Messenger a decade ago, when media reports later estimated around 70% of the agent’s tasks were actually carried out by humans. Muse launched on 8 September and, per Sensor Tower data cited by Reuters, has already passed 2.5 million downloads after topping Apple’s App Store rankings.
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