I gave Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots my passwords for a week
Scientific American · LC · trust 38/100
Meet Mark and Sam, the AI agents that ran my errands for a week
Meta’s and OpenAI’s new agents can streamline your life. Artificial intelligence researchers helped me test how far to trust them
For a week, it was my answer to everything, and my friends and family groaned every time.
Mark and Sam are my assistants—they make grocery lists, organize e-mails, run errands and the like. But no, 22-year-old journalists are not making assistant-hiring money. Mark (à la Zuckerberg ) and Sam (à la Altman ) are artificial intelligence agents, the newest brainchildren of Meta and OpenAI , respectively.
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In September Meta introduced Muse, an AI agent that can do a lot more than chat: it has its own “computer” and can make purchases, send e-mails and fill out forms for you—if you give it access.
A few weeks later, OpenAI answered with dots, its “always-on agents built to handle everything,” in the company’s words, for its highest-paying subscribers. Dots, too, can work more autonomously, and they do “proactive research” on your tasks even when you’re not using them.
Agent technology itself isn’t new or more advanced than other chatbots, says Nikhil Singh , a computer scientist at Dartmouth College. People have been building agents to help with all sorts of tasks for years, and earlier this year a free open-source agent called OpenClaw became a Silicon Valley obsession.
But Muse and dots offer this type of service to a huge commercial audience with almost no learning curve. Both agents are built to look like a text message chain with a friend: you give them names and cuddly avatars, and their language is intentionally more conversational than a traditional chatbot’s. Muse has a free tier, and OpenAI has said it plans to bring dots to more users soon. These are not tools simply meant for AI experts or even digital natives.
The “really big social differences,” Singh says, could arise from the pace and reach of adoption—how many people take up agents like these and to what ends. And what do we get in exchange for the keys to our inboxes and credit cards? I spent the week trying to find out by asking researchers who study AI for the best ways to test my new virtual hires.
Conveniently, I was also moving apartments and had plenty of tasks for Mark and Sam. First, I had Mark log in to my Facebook account and scour Marketplace for couches, lamps and rugs. When it found something good, it could draft and send a message to the seller with my approval (though users can also give the agents blanket permissions to do things like this on their own).
This was relatively successful: it could scan the site while I was doing other things, then manage the responses for me. I’m now the proud owner of a Muse-sourced dining table.
I tried to have Sam do the same, and it ran into some trouble: when I gave it my Facebook log-in, Meta flagged Sam as a bot (fair enough) and temporarily locked down my Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Clearly the two assistants weren’t going to play nice.
OpenAI announced its new agents, dots, at DevDay 2026 a few weeks after Meta rolled out Muse. Here's my dots' namesake at the announcement. Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty Images Sam, in general, had more trouble accessing my accounts and told me it didn’t have the capability for things such as accessing my bank accounts. Mark, on the other hand, had the run of my e-mail, bank accounts, social media and Spotify . (Once again, cue the shrieks of horror from my friends and family.)
This type of service works particularly well for Meta because its other products already rely on connection, conversation and access to users’ lives, says Pat Pataranutaporn , an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab who studies psychological responses to AI. “Meta wants to have a breakout into [AI], and so they came up with something that uses their strengths with social media and connection,” he says, “and now other companies need to respond.”
Pataranutaporn is interested in how these more personal anthropomorphized agents will change our relationship to the technology. With a name, a face and an intimate knowledge of our lives, they could easily become more friend than tool. Their arrival also brings us into a moment of “cognitive dissonance,” he says: while I was texting Mark and Sam about my move, some AI researchers were warning of an apocalypse .
“We have this narrative crisis about AI right now,” Pataranutaporn says. “There’s two opposite visions of the future, and while people worry about AI killing all of us, there’s this cute AI tool that’s being released.”
Though privacy concerns around these agents’ access may be terrifying in their own right, for now the utopian vision seems to be winning. Within a month of its launch, Muse had more than three million weekly users. And the longer you use it, the better it knows you.
Pataranutaporn suggested I test how much my agents had learned about my preferences. So near the end of the week, I told Mark and Sam to use all the information they had about me to suggest how I should spend $50.
Sam’s pick was sensible, if obvious: it offered to buy a used book I had asked it to find earlier in the week.
Mark had two ideas. The first came from my Spotify library: tickets to a January concert by Jess Williamson, a musician whose song I had saved. Not bad.
The second was less subtle. Mark pushed me—seven times in three days—to join Target’s membership program and buy a lamp that was going on sale for my new apartment.…
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