Meta's Muse Agent Takes Aim at the Subscription Economy's Debt to Forgetting

Meta rolled out Muse this month, and within weeks the AI personal agent has found one of the consumer economy's most reliable profit engines: the subscription people forgot they were paying for.

Muse is an AI personal agent designed to handle tasks across many areas of personal life. Among its early capabilities is the power to help consumers identify and cancel recurring subscriptions. Subscription-management services have existed for years, but Muse folds that function into a much broader assistant — making forgotten monthly charges far easier to surface and kill.

The stakes for the subscription industry are substantial. The economics of the business have long rested on a simple asymmetry in consumer behavior: people are much better at signing up than canceling. They forget what they joined. They stop using services but keep paying. A $9 or $15 monthly charge can disappear into a credit card statement for months, sometimes years.

Stanford economist Neale Mahoney has quantified exactly how much that asymmetry is worth to sellers. Mahoney, an economics professor and director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, co-authored the 2025 American Economic Review paper "Selling Subscriptions" with fellow Stanford economists Liran Einav and Ben Klopack.

"We found that when people are forced to decide, they are about four times more likely to cancel," Mahoney said.

The researchers estimated that sellers can roughly double their revenue because of two forces: consumer inertia, when people forget or put off canceling, and cancellation friction, when ending a subscription takes too much time or effort. An AI agent that watches a user's accounts could weaken both.

Subscription spending is still climbing

The timing of Muse's arrival matters because consumers keep adding recurring charges faster than they remove them. Close to half of U.S. consumers — 44% — increased their subscription spending in 2025, with average annual spending rising to $1,887, or about $157 a month, according to a report published by Mastercard and FT Strategies in April.

Bank of America payments data shows subscription spend rose 7.7% year-over-year in July, faster than overall card spending. Entertainment and retail subscriptions accounted for about 43% of the total.

Data from ScribeUp, a company that builds subscription-management technology into banking apps for banks, credit unions, and fintech companies, illustrates the accumulation problem. The median ScribeUp user now carries more than 12 recurring subscription payments. One in four has 20 or more. Over the past year, the share of users with at least eight subscriptions rose from 62% to 71%.

"More of life is becoming a recurring bill. Those bills cost more every year, and it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to keep track of everything they are paying for," said Jordan Mackler, ScribeUp's co-founder and CEO.

Consumers are already canceling more

Even before AI agents entered the picture, consumers were becoming more aggressive about cutting subscriptions. ScribeUp says its members are now 1.8 times more likely to initiate a cancellation than they were a year ago — a shift Mackler said predates the company's newer AI capabilities and reflects a broader change in consumer behavior.

Category-level data from ScribeUp shows where the pressure is sharpest. Health and fitness subscriptions have seen cancellations rise 3.8 times year-over-year, followed by video streaming at 2.2 times, news and media at 2.1 times, and music streaming at 1.9 times. Price hikes accelerate the exit: Mackler said cancellations at an individual merchant can jump as much as 50% when prices rise.

AI is also expanding the reach of automated cancellation. ScribeUp currently tracks roughly 200,000 unique recurring billers. Before adding its newer agentic capabilities this year, it could automate cancellations for only a few hundred major subscription companies.

The financial payoff for individuals is concrete. The average canceled subscription costs $17.39 a month, and Mackler said ScribeUp saves users more than $300 a year on average on recurring bills they didn't realize they were paying for or no longer needed.

Not every subscription faces the same risk. Mahoney noted that a physical subscription, such as pet food, is hard to forget when the product keeps arriving at your door. A digital service, such as credit monitoring, can quietly keep billing long after a consumer stops thinking about it.

Apollo warns the effects could reach banking

The implications may extend well beyond the subscription business itself. Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok argues that AI agents intervening in consumer psychology could reshape core financial services that banks take for granted.

"Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system," Slok wrote in an analysis last week.

That warning frames Muse as more than a convenience feature. If personal AI agents routinely optimize household finances — canceling dead subscriptions, moving idle cash to higher-yield accounts — the cheap funding that underpins retail banking comes into question.

Subscription companies face a retention rethink

Subscription companies already operate with significant churn. The Mastercard report found average monthly churn — the percentage of subscribers who cancel or fail to renew in a given month — is 20%. More than half of U.S. subscription businesses surveyed said at least 10% of their subscriber base was inactive: still subscribed, but not actively using the service.

As consumers gain more control over recurring charges, companies may need to compete harder to keep them. Hitee Chandra Jha, principal product manager at Zendesk specializing in product-led growth and customer retention, said companies may need to make value more visible before a customer reaches the cancellation screen.

For some, that means treating cancellation less as an all-or-nothing event. A streaming service whose customer has finished watching a series might be better off offering a pause rather than a desperate discount, Jha said. A fitness-app user who has reached a goal could be moved to a maintenance tier.

"Treating cancellation as a transition, not just a loss, is what differentiates a mature retention strategy from a defensive one," Jha said. "The best defense against AI-assisted cancellation is not friction."

Data from subscription-management company Recurly supports that approach. Its 2026 State of Subscriptions report, based on 76 million unique subscribers across more than 2,200 businesses, found that the use of "pause before cancel" options jumped 337% — and three out of four customers who paused eventually returned.

Mastercard's research points the same way. Of the consumers surveyed, 74% said they are more likely to subscribe when cancellation is easy, and 70% said they are more likely to resubscribe. Another 34% said they would remain subscribed if given the option to pause rather than cancel.

Muse's rocky start and a possible upside

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has positioned Muse as the "centerpiece" of an AI strategy surrounded by still unproven consumer hardware, from augmented reality glasses to the Muse Charm keychain fob-like device. It is a bet the market has recently rewarded the company for making.

The agent has already drawn resistance. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site, saying the agent's access violated its terms of service. Privacy concerns around giving an AI access to financial information also remain significant. Still, 43% of consumers said they are comfortable with AI managing their subscriptions, according to the Recurly data.

And the emergence of AI-assisted cancellation may not spell the end of subscription growth. ScribeUp has observed that once users trust the recurring charges on their accounts are the ones they actually chose, they become more comfortable with subscriptions overall and increase their total subscription spending.

"If consumers trust that they can easily see, manage, and cancel recurring charges, our data shows they are likely to expand their overall recurring spend and are more willing to try new services in the first place," Mackler said.

Mahoney argues a healthier market should produce businesses that don't rely on slowing consumers down but instead give them more ways to stay on their own terms.

"When people are trapped in subscriptions they don't want or can't get out of, market forces are limited, and companies don't have the incentives to have a high-quality product at a low price. They can just rely on a locked-in install base," he said.

Whether it is AI or the consumer taking action, when people stop paying for something they no longer want and spend that money elsewhere, "that's good for consumers, it's good for markets, and it's good for firms that are making products that people want," Mahoney said. "That's economics working the way it's supposed to work."