Key points
- Sensor Tower counts 10.9 million Muse downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of them in the U.S., within 40 days.
- Muse's U.S. retention was 30% at 7 days and 23% at 14 days, versus rival AI app averages of 19% and 16%.
- Meta paused Muse's conversation-sharing feature after security firm Claroc said it found more than 6,800 share links through public DNS records.
- Claroc says it viewed chats including a marketing company's revenue review, a loan application and a staff calendar.
Why it matters for marketers: Muse is becoming a channel marketers must plan for, but the paused sharing feature is a reminder not to put client data, revenue figures or strategy into AI chats.
Meta's AI assistant Muse has reached 10.2 million U.S. downloads in its first 40 days, according to Sensor Tower data reported by TechCrunch. Only 11 other apps have hit that mark, most of them mobile games. Threads and Disney+ are the only other non-game apps on the list. Meta is backing the launch with ads: Sensor Tower says Muse took 39% of Meta's ad spend in October, up from 23% in September.
Early engagement looks solid. Muse's U.S. retention was 30% after 7 days and 23% after 14 days, ahead of the average for rivals such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. Daily active users hit 2.5 million on October 16. Muse is available only in the U.S. and Canada for now, which limits comparisons with ChatGPT's global numbers.
The growth comes with a privacy problem. The Verge, citing Ars Technica, reports that Meta paused Muse's feature for sharing conversations by link after security firm Claroc said it found more than 6,800 links through public DNS records. Claroc says each link's address was built from a title describing the chat plus a random ID, which made the pages easier to find.
For marketers, this cuts two ways. A fast-growing assistant with strong retention and heavy ad support may soon warrant a place in audience and channel planning. But the exposed chats, which Claroc says included a marketing company's revenue review, show the risk of pasting sensitive material into consumer AI tools. Similar sharing features on ChatGPT, Claude and Grok have also surfaced chats in Google Search.
Watch for how Meta changes link discovery before restoring sharing. Teams should check their policies on what staff can enter into AI assistants and avoid sharing client or financial data through public links.
Sources
This brief is our own summary. Read the full reporting at the source.
