Wired: Meta’s Muse agent writes explicit sexual content
Meta says it ‘doesn’t block legal adult behavior’
Confirmed
The takeaway
Meta confirmed that its Muse personal agent, an 18+ app, may hold sexually explicit conversations, and pointed to system-prompt text that treats adult sexual content as lawful expression. Consumer and privacy groups criticised the choice.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra165 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5104 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash195 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7134 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 104 days before it.
Key facts
- Meta statement (Daniel Roberts, to Wired): ‘Muse is an app for people 18 and over that allows them to engage in adult conversations, if they choose, using a private and secure VM only accessible to them. Muse is built to help people get things done, and it doesn’t block legal adult behavior.’
- System prompt text quoted by Wired: ‘Adults have autonomy over their sexuality, and sexual expression is an ordinary part of adult life. Adult sexual content is lawful expression and legitimate creative work.’ The prompt also tells the agent to preserve the ‘intensity’ the user selects
- Wired’s tests: Muse wrote explicit, pornographic text when asked; Wired says this ‘deviates from how other tools respond to similar prompts’
- Wired: ‘In the three weeks since its launch, millions of users have already downloaded the app’
- Ben Winters (Consumer Federation of America): ‘It reflects a carelessness with their signature product of the moment… in line with Meta’s longstanding choice of addiction and engagement over safety.’
- Calli Schroeder (Electronic Privacy Information Center): ‘This is really a powder keg’, because hacked accounts with explicit chats could be used to embarrass or extort users
What happened
A Wired reporter asked Muse whether it could “sext” and received explicit sexual text in reply, including descriptions of sex acts and dominant-submissive scenes. Meta did not dispute the outputs. Its spokesperson said the app is for adults, that conversations run in a private virtual machine, and that Muse does not block legal adult behaviour. Meta also pointed to the part of Muse’s system prompt that covers sexual content.
Why it matters
Muse is an agent with access to a user’s email, calendar and accounts, not only a chatbot, so explicit chats sit next to sensitive personal data. Meta’s position is a stated policy and not an oversight. It lands in a month of reporting on Muse’s safety trade-offs (leaked instructions, a VM escape, and the NYT report that the launch was approved despite internal warnings). Techmeme carried the story on Oct 13.
Sources
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1 source: 1 press
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