Karan Joshi extracts Muse files on everyone you know

Muse's rapid adoption — millions of downloads, with users connecting bank accounts, messages, and health data — made its inner workings a natural target for scrutiny. In recent days, multiple researchers extracted its internal files, and one, independent AI safety and security researcher Karan Joshi, pulled an extensive array of instructions and system prompts simply by asking the chat interface to share its own software files.

The extracted instructions describe an hourly routine that builds "a page for every person in the user's life," drawing on family, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and people the user follows. Muse's documentation says a page may start sparse and fill out over time, with sections such as Facts, History, The relationship, In common, Open threads, and Strengthening. The instructions tell the model to use only available evidence, because invented details are worse than an empty page, and can note "the dates that matter," like birthdays or anniversaries, alongside a person's history.

The context here matters: Meta says Muse gathers this from public information and what users choose to share, and the agent runs on a dedicated virtual machine per user, with an audit log and memory-wiping controls. As Carissa Véliz of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI puts it, AI systems are being given far more information about us than we get from them. The test may be whether those controls are enough to offset what Miranda Bogen of the Center for Democracy and Technology describes as tools actively soliciting users to plug their whole lives in.