Meta built an AI that can shop for you. The problem is that most people don’t want AI spending their money

After a long week at work, the perfect Saturday for some people involves grabbing coffee with friends and walking around, spending the hard-earned money they toiled all week to earn. Shopping can be a form of therapy—it’s something even Cher Horowitz understood in Clueless. But Silicon Valley has a different idea: Shopping is a chore best handed to artificial intelligence.

On Tuesday, Meta became the latest tech giant to join the AI shopping rush, with Muse: a personal agent that can use years of social activity to understand a consumer’s taste, search for products, navigate checkout, and prepare a purchase for final approval. It joins a rapidly expanding crowd of AI personal shoppers from Amazon, Google, Walmart, Disney, Uber, and OpenAI, all competing to control the increasingly valuable journey between wanting something and paying for it.

Muse, which will initially roll out to U.S. adults for free, can act autonomously on a user’s behalf to complete tasks, ranging from messaging friends and planning a night out to shopping for a vacation outfit.  Unlike a conventional chatbot that suggests products or compares prices, Muse can navigate checkout and pay through Stripe’s Link service after presenting the total for the consumer to approve, according to Meta.

But the industry’s eagerness to automate shopping is running ahead of consumers’ willingness to actually surrender it. Some consumers are already embracing AI for parts of the shopping process: traffic from AI-powered assistants and chatbots to retail websites jumped 693.4% during the........

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