Can China match up with Meta’s Muse in race to harness AI agents?

Meta Platforms’ breakout Muse personal AI agent is shining a spotlight on a new battleground in artificial intelligence – one in which China’s biggest internet companies are already jostling for position.

Launched on September 8, Muse surpassed 2.5 million downloads in its first two weeks and topped free-app rankings on Apple and Google’s US app stores. Its popularity has drawn fresh attention to the emerging market for what are known as agent harnesses.

Unlike chatbots, which merely respond to prompts, agent harnesses provide underlying AI models with persistent memory, tool access and the autonomy to execute more complex tasks.

Meta says Muse operates across the web and connected services like email and calendars, and can help users fill out forms, make purchases and book travel while remembering their preferences.

Industry analysts said agent harnesses could shift more of the AI sector’s value away from foundational models and towards the software layer.

Analysts at financial research and brokerage firm Bernstein said in a recent report that the main prize was “context lock-in”: the more an agent learned about a user’s habits, history and workflows, the more useful – and harder to replace – it could become.

That dynamic could favour Chinese internet giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding – the owner of the South China Morning Post – whose sprawling ecosystems encompassed messaging, payments, e-commerce, workplace software and cloud computing, the report said.

Muse’s success had revived investor interest in the value of such integrated ecosystems, said Winnie Wu, head of Asia-Pacific equity strategy and co-head of China equity research at Bank of America.

“With a chatbot, it doesn’t have a differentiation point,” Wu said. “It’s about whether the agent can get things done for you.”

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