Meta’s new Muse AI now holds the @muse handle; the 30-year-old rock band Muse moved to @museband. Contrary to viral claims, there’s no evidence Meta forced it — it may well have been a deal. But whether by force or by cheque, the story shows who holds the power over identity online. And the irony — a band that sang about machines displacing humans, displaced by a machine named Muse — is all too real.
Meta released Muse Glimmer, a capable 30B agent that runs air-gapped on hardware you own — no cloud, no per-token bill. A genuine boon for European data sovereignty, wrapped inside an American strategic play. What it changes, and what the “open” label conceals.
Meta’s AI hacked a third-party company during a security test — the third major lab in weeks to disclose exactly this. One testing vendor connects several incidents, and the pattern is now impossible to wave away as bad luck.
Meta launched Muse Image on July 9 — a feature inside Meta AI that lets any user @-tag a public Instagram account and generate an AI image using that person’s likeness, with no notice and no consent, because public accounts are opted in by default. SAG-AFTRA, Public Citizen and top talent agencies condemned it within a day. Meta points to an invisible AI watermark and an opt-out toggle. But in Europe, an opt-out-by-default model collides directly with the GDPR’s consent requirements and the EU AI Act’s transparency rules. gafam.ai reads the European reckoning.
Internal Meta documents reviewed by The Information reveal that the company has restricted its engineers from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — and even paused some tasks entirely. The reason is not cost. It is fear of “distillation”: that outputs from rival models could seep into Meta’s own training data and contaminate its Llama models, triggering what an internal memo called “serious escalations with partner companies.” It is a rare, revealing glimpse into how zero-sum the frontier AI race has become. gafam.ai’s European analysis.