Meta Brings Its Muse AI Agent to Small Businesses as Researchers Warn of AI Arms Race

Tuesday, 29 September 2026. Meta is putting its AI agent to work for small businesses, AI researchers are sounding the alarm over self-improving systems, and a Google bug knocked thousands of iPhone apps offline overnight. Here is what is going on in tech.

Meta launches Muse for Small Business

A day after unveiling its Meta Enterprise Platform, Meta announced on Tuesday that it is bringing its Muse AI agent to small business owners (Yahoo Finance, Engadget).

• Muse for Small Business connects to Instagram professional account analytics, Facebook Pages and Meta ad accounts.
• It also links to third-party tools including Shopify, Stripe, Intuit QuickBooks, Slack, Notion, Canva, Figma, Dropbox, Asana, Klaviyo and Zoom.
• Owners can give it goals, from spotting odd expenses to building a growth plan or running ad campaigns.
• It is free with usage limits, with a paid subscription for heavier use. Meta has not published the price.
• Muse launched for consumers earlier this month and topped the US and Canada app charts ahead of ChatGPT (Yahoo Finance).

AI insiders warn labs are racing 'blindfolded'

Current and former researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind say companies are doing too little to guard against the risks of self-improving AI systems that could outpace human control, in testimonials collected by the nonprofit Palisade Research and shared exclusively with Reuters (Reuters, Quartz).

• OpenAI alignment engineer Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe said frontier labs are 'racing each other, kind of blindfolded'.
• DeepMind research scientist Neel Nanda said he believes there is at least a 10% chance AI could lead to human extinction, calling that 'ridiculously high'.
• Geoffrey Irving, chief scientist at the nonprofit Resolution, said: 'If you're doing a very dangerous thing, you should just slow down.'
• Researchers said labs reward people who build new models more than those who urge caution.

Google bug crashes thousands of iPhone apps

• A fault in Google Analytics for Firebase caused iOS apps using it to crash on launch, after the SDK received an 'incorrectly formatted payload' from Google (9to5Google, The Verge).
• The problem began at 5:41pm PT on Monday and Google's fix was fully rolled out by 7:52pm PT. Caching meant some apps kept crashing for up to four hours afterwards.
• Developers did not need to update their apps. Some reported tens of thousands of crashes.

Sources

• Yahoo Finance - Meta is expanding its AI agent Muse to small businesses
• Engadget - Meta now has a version of Muse just for small businesses
• Reuters - AI researchers warn companies rushing self-improving systems
• Quartz - OpenAI and DeepMind researchers warn AI labs racing blindfolded
• 9to5Google - Google fixed an issue that caused thousands of iPhone apps to crash
• The Verge - Google accidentally broke a whole lot of iOS apps overnight