Meta Launches Its Muse AI Agent in Japan With Mercari, Money Forward ME and Ticket Pia Links
Meta began offering Muse, its personal AI agent, in Japan on October 23, making the country its first market outside North America, where the service launched in September, the company said in a Japanese-language announcement. The Nikkei reported that users can instruct Muse by chat or voice to send email or shop on e-commerce sites on their behalf.
For the Japanese launch Meta is working with several local services. Through Muse, users can reach the flea-market app Mercari, the household budgeting app Money Forward ME and the ticketing service Ticket Pia, alongside global connectors such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Instagram, Shopify, Trip.com, Agoda and Klook. Meta said it would keep adding services that Japanese users rely on every day. The agent runs on smartphones, and Meta plans to bring it to its glasses, including Ray-Ban smart glasses made with EssilorLuxottica.
Meta describes a safety design built around isolation. Each user's Muse runs in a dedicated cloud virtual machine, Muse Secure VM, that stores connected-service data and credentials, while a separate Sentinel agent manages internet access. Muse cannot see passwords or payment methods, keeps working on long tasks after the app is closed, and asks for approval before important actions such as sending an email or buying something. Users can review a history of its actions, revoke access and opt out of having their conversations used to train Meta's models, and the company says Muse data is not shared with its advertising systems.
What it means in practice
The Nikkei framed the launch as a test of agentic commerce in Japan. Ask Muse to buy coffee beans and it compares products across several sites and proposes options; purchase and payment could eventually be automated as well. If that habit spreads, online retailers and travel-booking services risk losing direct contact with customers. The Nikkei noted that shares of online travel firms such as Booking Holdings and Airbnb fell after Muse appeared in the United States, while Amazon has reportedly said it will not connect with outside agents.
Japanese organisations are already testing agents inside their own walls, from the Digital Agency's rollout of agent tools to government staff to NSSOL's Claude agents for enterprises. Muse brings the same idea to consumers, and to the neighbourhood shops trying generative assistants that may one day find an agent standing between them and their buyers.
What to watch: which Japanese retailers and payment providers join as connectors, whether Amazon's Japanese business stays out, and when the voice mode and Muse email address shown at Meta Connect arrive in Japan.