Meta’s AI companion app Muse has passed 10 million downloads in the United States within its first 40 days on the market, according to new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower reported by TechCrunch on October 20. Muse has been downloaded 10.9 million times worldwide since its September debut, and 10.2 million of those downloads were in the United States, the only market besides Canada where the app is available.
The milestone puts Muse in rare company. It has also held the number one spot on the US App Store for nearly every day since launch, and its daily active users reached 2.5 million for the first time on October 16.
Muse’s 40-Day Download Milestone, In Context
Only 11 other apps have ever reached 10 million US downloads in their first 40 days, Sensor Tower senior insights analyst Kara Lee told TechCrunch. Most of them were mobile games, including Fortnite, PUBG Mobile and Pokémon GO. The only other non-game apps on the list are Disney+ and Meta’s own Threads, which hit the mark in July 2023.
Against its direct AI rivals, Muse’s US start is well ahead. ChatGPT recorded 3.7 million US downloads in its first 40 days on the market, while Grok managed about 500,000 and Claude about 200,000 over the same span, according to Sensor Tower’s figures. Globally the picture reverses: ChatGPT reached roughly 15 million downloads worldwide in its first 40 days, helped by markets such as Japan, Brazil and Germany. Muse, by contrast, is on sale only in the United States and Canada for now.
Meta Is Spending Heavily To Push Muse
Distribution is doing much of the work. Meta allocated 39% of its total advertising spend to marketing Muse in October, up from 23% in September, per Sensor Tower’s data. Muse now ranks as the 21st largest brand in the United States by advertising impressions this month, up from 73rd in September.
On top of paid advertising, Meta markets its new apps across its existing services, the same playbook that scaled Threads on top of Instagram’s social graph. Muse content is integrated into Facebook and Instagram, and Meta’s family of apps reaches 3.6 billion daily active users, giving a new product an audience no standalone AI lab can match on day one.
Muse’s Retention And Daily Use Are Holding Up
Downloads bought with advertising only matter if users stay, and Sensor Tower’s retention figures are Muse’s strongest numbers. In the United States, the app kept 30% of users after seven days and 23% after 14 days. Its AI rivals averaged a 19% seven-day retention rate and 16% at 14 days across ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, according to the firm.
Engagement is climbing as well. Muse’s daily active users reached 2.5 million for the first time on October 16, a 15% increase week over week. The app has held the number one rank on the US App Store on every day since launch except October 19, when the streaming app Kick briefly passed it, and it has been number one on Google Play for the past 30 days.
Why It Matters
Muse’s first 40 days show distribution becoming a decisive attribute in the AI assistant race. The central contest between Muse, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok is no longer only about model quality: Meta can put its assistant in front of billions of existing users and outspend rivals on advertising, and its retention figures suggest the users arriving through that machine are staying at higher rates than the category average. For rival labs, the neighbour problem is structural — every point of US retention Muse holds is share they must win back without a social graph of their own. The milestone also raises the stakes on Muse’s rough edges: this is the same agentic app whose chat sharing Meta paused this week after researchers found thousands of shared chats discoverable in public DNS records, and whose Marketplace agent recently shared a seller’s home address with a buyer. Scale arrived before the safety record did.
Background
Meta launched Muse as a standalone AI companion and agent app in September 2026, spinning the assistant out of its social apps and into its own product. The app runs on Meta’s Muse model family, trained on the company’s Prometheus supercluster in Ohio, whose first phase Meta completed this month on the way to a planned one million GPUs. Muse can carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, which is why its growth is being watched as a test of whether mainstream users will hand real work to an AI agent — and why its early privacy stumbles have drawn outsized attention.
Source: TechCrunch, reporting Sensor Tower data (October 20, 2026)
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