Meta introduced a new "personal AI agent" called Muse on Tuesday. By the time it did, the Instagram handle @muse — held for more than ten years by the band Muse, which has spent decades filling arenas — belonged to the agent, and the band had moved to @museband. The same swap happened on X: Meta's AI now holds @muse there, and the band goes by @musetheband. Meta did not immediately respond to a question about whether the handover was voluntary and whether the band was paid for it. Muse has not commented either.
The timeline is not in dispute. An archived copy of the band's own website shows Muse still using @muse on Instagram last month. What replaced it is a product launched by the company that owns Instagram. The most plausible reading is that Meta exercised a platform owner's ability to reclaim a long-occupied name, and that the alternative on the table was leaving the new tool as @museAI — a handle that reads like a placeholder, which is presumably why it is not the one in use.
Fans noticed within hours and mostly did not care for it. A viral Reddit post claimed the band had been "forced" to change its handles, which produced a second wave of anger. One confused fan wrote that it was "actually the worst". Another called Mark Zuckerberg a loser. A different faction, following the older logic of music fandom, accused the English rockers of selling out, having apparently concluded that Muse took money from a large technology company in exchange for their social media names.
Nobody actually knows which of those happened. The strongest available clue is that the changes appeared on Instagram and X at the same time, which points toward a negotiated transfer rather than a unilateral seizure — Meta owns one of those platforms and not the other, and a band that had just been stripped of a name on Instagram has no particular reason to hand over its name on X the same day.
That inference is also where the story gets uncomfortable for everyone involved. A voluntary, compensated deal is the single easiest thing in this entire situation to confirm. It would take Meta one sentence and cost it nothing; it would take Muse one post and end the accusations against them. Two parties with an obvious interest in saying "this was a deal" have both said nothing, and the vacuum is being filled by the assumption that it was not one. Whatever the agreement says, someone decided the terms were better left unstated.
The other thing absent from the launch is any acknowledgement that the name came from somewhere. Meta did not stumble onto an unused word. It named a consumer AI product after an act with a decade-old account on its own platform, and the handle moved in step with the launch. The name was not incidental to the product; it was part of it.
There is precedent, and it is not encouraging. In 2023, when Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, the company took the handle @X from a user who had held it since 2007. What he was offered in return was branded merchandise and a visit to X headquarters.
AI products are being launched faster than short, memorable English words are becoming available, and the companies launching them own the registries where those words are kept. Muse held @muse for more than ten years and is now @museband, and neither side will say how that happened. The band is famous enough that people noticed.