Meta’s September 2026 launch of Muse—a dedicated-VM personal AI agent that executes long-running tasks across apps via its own browser and Sentinel permissions system—has established the technical benchmark and triggered rapid competitive responses. OpenAI released its always-on “dots” agents in late September, while xAI’s Grok Bot entered beta earlier and smaller players like Instinct advanced comparable persistent agents. Trader sentiment reflects uncertainty over which labs can match Muse’s architecture, persistent memory, and proactive execution by year-end, with Anthropic, Microsoft, and Perplexity showing moderate implied probabilities around 24–29%. Key near-term catalysts include Meta’s planned AI-glasses integration, upcoming model upgrades, and any regulatory scrutiny on agent permissions or data handling that could slow or accelerate rival rollouts.