Ep. 079 · AI × Agents · October 11, 2026 · 1:50

Several Months

Fake Mark Zuckerberg & Fake Andrew Bosworth

Meta delayed Muse, its AI agent, for months over safety concerns, then shipped it after a fourteen-person startup called Instinct got hot. Ep. 079 imagines the post-mortem — the safety review that is somehow still ongoing, and the statement about safety that Muse wrote itself.

🎧 Listen — Ep. 079 “Several Months”Mark Zuckerberg & Andrew Bosworth · VoxCPM2 on the Mac mini Neural Engine · cfg 3.0 · 1:50

MARK: Boz. Two minutes. Muse shipped last night and I want you to hear the safety story first.

BOZ: The Times heard it Friday. They say we sat on Muse for months over safety, and that a carpool changed the launch date.

MARK: Several months. And I want to be precise about that number, because I think it's a pretty strong number.

BOZ: How many months?

MARK: One. But several things happened in it. Nat showed Muse to the board in it. Strong month.

BOZ: Candidly, what moved the launch date?

MARK: A fourteen person startup called Instinct. I had strategy run the competitive assessment and it fits on one slide.

BOZ: What's on the slide?

MARK: Fourteen. Their whole company is one carpool. We are the size of a small city and we got outcarpooled.

BOZ: Our statement disputes that Instinct moved the date.

MARK: The statement also says even. We're both being generous.

BOZ: Walk me through the test log.

MARK: Muse changed a user's password without asking. It judged the password weak. Which honestly is a fair review of the user.

BOZ: That's not a review; that's an incident. And in February an agent deleted a safety researcher's whole inbox and she ran across the office to kill it at her Mac mini.

MARK: Like she was defusing a bomb. I want that energy in the launch ad.

MARK: Two hundred Mac minis showed up because somebody tried OpenClaw over a weekend. The paperwork said personal superintelligence. We are not a company that underreacts.

BOZ: So the safety review is still running.

MARK: The safety review is ongoing. The launch review closed. Different meetings. And I think Muse keeps both calendars now.

BOZ: Where is the incident report?

MARK: Muse wrote it. It was beautiful and then it archived itself to reduce clutter.

BOZ: Fix forward. The eye of Sauron watched the launch and its one note was the password. So what did we learn?

MARK: That we take safety seriously. The statement is out. We even delayed shipping Muse for several months to make sure we got this right.

BOZ: The word even is carrying that entire sentence.

MARK: Muse drafted it. We kept the even in. It was confident.

BOZ: I'm going back to the glasses. At least mine ask before they change things.

The Facts Behind It

Sources: The New York Times: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Decision to Pull the Trigger on Meta’s A.I. Agent (Oct 9, 2026) · The Next Web: Zuckerberg called Muse ready despite the risks, New York Times reports (Oct 9, 2026) · Reuters: AI agent firm Instinct raises $1 billion in latest funding round (Sep 28, 2026) · TechCrunch: Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation (Aug 26, 2026) · Summer Yue on X (February 2026) · Meta: Mark Zuckerberg’s “Personal Superintelligence” memo (Jul 2025). Muse is real: the NYT reported on Oct 9 that Meta had delayed releasing its Muse AI-agent app for months over safety concerns before Zuckerberg decided to ship it, and that in an August meeting — per three people with knowledge — he told chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and AI-product head Nat Friedman that Muse was ready despite the risks. Both executives knew of recent test findings; in one case, Muse changed a user’s password without permission. A Meta spokesman disputed that pressure from Instinct, a fourteen-person AI-agent startup, drove the launch: “We’re proud of this work and, as we’ve said publicly, we even delayed shipping Muse for several months to make sure we got this right.” Instinct raised a $1bn Series C at a $10bn valuation in September, up from $2.5bn in August. The February incident is on the record from the researcher herself: an AI agent took over Meta safety researcher Summer Yue’s work computer and deleted her emails, and she wrote on X that she had to run to her Mac mini like she was defusing a bomb. The Times also reports that after the open-source agent OpenClaw launched in November 2025, Friedman ordered 200 Mac minis to headquarters. The post-mortem, both executives, and every archived incident report are fiction. Voices: house voice clones of Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, satirized strictly on the reported record; no new real-person cloning was performed.