“I do see this as a continued trajectory of their main business model of controlling what people see, putting ads in front of them, and collecting more data,” Mir says.

It’s definitely rational to be anxious about handing over your credit card to an agent. Even if you could trust these AI tools wouldn’t be tricked into spending money in ways you don’t want, outsourcing your shopping decisions can have unintended consequences. Consumer advocates see this purchasing automation as potentially opening the door for companies to prioritize certain brands or other products in an agent’s output, based on sponsorship deals. Meta’s Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang hinted in an interview with Axios that it’s looking for more revenue opportunities in Muse that aren’t ads, without disclosing specifics.

Personally, I enjoy the slow scrolls of online shopping, where I can spend an hour on a website and leave with nothing in my cart. There’s a whimsical inefficiency to browsing Depop for leather jackets I likely won’t even buy. By exploring the Internet on my own, I’m slowly building my own sense of taste and curating an understanding of what I actually enjoy. If Muse does everything for me, I lose out on the journey that led to the decision.

“At some point, the AI is making all of your meaningful taste decisions, your preference decisions, decisions about where you go, where you eat, what you do, what vacations you take,” Schroeder says. “That’s kind of the joy of being human—getting to test things out and figure out what you like. So, the concept of turning all of that over to a machine is pretty horrifying to me.”

Sharing Machines

Relying on agents, like Meta’s Muse, could degrade our functioning while these tools collect data about us.

“The design of AI agents is such that it disengages users,” says Margaret Mitchell, a researcher and chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face. “So, users become more passive.” Mitchell recently co-wrote a research paper unpacking how agentic tools are not effectively designed for human oversight and may actually worsen the user’s ability to assess what the agent is doing on their behalf.

People who use agents may become overly reliant on the tools, even more so than when interacting with a standard chatbot, since agents have access to more information and can do more tasks. One potential impact is “cognitive degradation,” where users rely on automations from a confident-sounding, external source and are less able to make independent decisions.

Mitchell also sees high levels of personalization as potentially priming users to share even more data about themselves. “It’s not only that it knows about you, so you trust it more,” she says. “It’s that it’s actually aligning to you in what it talks about and how it talks about it, in a way that further pulls you into interacting with it and divulging more private information.” Recent research shows that AI tools may start to mirror a user’s speaking style as they collect more interaction data.

While Muse is powerful, I’ve decided to send this data goblin back to its cave, and deleted the app after my initial experiments.

Before I could remove Muse from my phone, the agent sent me one final ping. A tip! I wonder what it could be. “Connect your apps so I can do more,” the notification read. Alright, buddy. I heard you the first time.

Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.

Molly McCann Sanders has a lot in common with many of the other women who helped Donald Trump win a second term as president. A pro-life Catholic who lives in Texas, she has staunchly conservative opinions on immigration and a fierce hatred of eminent domain—the practice of the government taking private property for public use.

Sanders, the president of the Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, which was started by Phyllis Schlafly, also describes herself as “a crunchy MAHA mom”—and says she’s been paying particular attention to data centers.

“I’m alarmed by the idea that these data centers can move in and pollute,” she tells me. “I’m not a data center expert. I’m not a tech expert. But I’m suspicious and wary, and want to move slowly.”

She loves Trump, “but I think he’s wrong about data centers,” she says. And she sees the GOP’s effort to court what she calls “the laptop class”—young men who are enthusiastic about technology—at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month as a huge misstep with midterms nearing.

McCann Sanders isn’t alone. More than 60 percent of Americans, including 47 percent of Republicans, say they are opposed to the construction of data centers in a poll released by The New York Times last week. In August, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a private memo to AI companies sounding the alarm on how voters perceive data centers, warning that “campaign or party committees can not fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.” Last week, GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio issued a memo to the party’s candidates claiming that “unqualified support for building more AI data centers is a losing position.”

But the GOP is facing one big hurdle: Trump himself. In recent weeks, facing mounting scrutiny on his policies and support for the industry, Trump has doubled down on his defense of both data centers and AI. In late August, he wrote in a Truth Social post that only communities that wanted to be “backwards and poor” would refuse data centers coming to town.

Last week, he issued yet another series of posts boosting AI data centers. Users on his own Truth Social platform pushed back. An analysis from The New York Times of thousands of responses found that anti-data-center and anti-AI comments—including from staunch MAGA accounts—outnumbered positive comments by four to one.

Sanders says she sometimes “looks past” the wilder things Trump says, but she can’t fully overlook his pro-data-center rhetoric.

“That is not the right way to go about this,” she says of the “backwards and poor” post. “We do have legitimate concerns. There are real problems.”

My colleague Hugo Lowell, who covers the White House and writes our Inner Loop newsletter, says he’s not surprised by Trump’s attitude. “He’s bullish on AI,” he tells me. “He’s been told that restricting data center development means restricting compute, which means the US loses to China.”

The China competition angle is being publicly echoed by tech accelerationists and White House allies, including former White House AI czar David Sacks and investor and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. The latter debated Steve Bannon’s tech editor Joe Allen—whom I profiled last month—at an auxiliary event during the convention. That conversation between Lonsdale and Allen, Sanders says, was the only time she heard data centers brought up during the entire midterm convention.

Just past 6 pm on a recent Wednesday night, half a dozen pet owners logged into a Zoom meeting to confess something they’re afraid to talk about in public: They’re fed up with their dogs.

Before discussion began, Louise Crane, the president and cofounder of Dogs Anonymous, the organization hosting the meeting, recited the seven acknowledgements participants must agree to, the first being, “I admit that life with my dog is not what I imagined.” Crane wore a black T-shirt exclaiming “Abolish ICE” in thick white lettering.

“I may need to be talked off a ledge,” one attendee said as conversation kicked off, mentioning that she wasn’t sure how to handle her dog’s mood swings. Her family had been through a series of new changes: Their other dog died and they were also fostering one, and now their boxer was “unsettled” and “grumpy” to the point he was doing more “demand barking, which has never been like him.”

Other attendees confessed their private shames: a shepherd mix had started engaging in more intense “resource guarding” when around other dogs—the term for when dogs aggressively protect something they value. “He got into it with my sister’s little weiner dog the other day because they both were begging for food.” One woman, who lives in a busy apartment complex, needed advice on how to better handle her dachshund’s constant barking at strangers. (In the spirit of anonymity, Dogs Anonymous asked WIRED to leave out the names and identifying characteristics of its participants.)

Shame is the emotion attendees struggle with the most in these meetings. “The embarrassment of having a dog that’s losing its shit, especially as a woman,” is difficult for some people, Crane tells me when we speak a few days before.

Crane launched Dogs Anonymous, a nonprofit focused on training and emotional support by animal behavior experts, in 2025 in an attempt to help people vocalize their shame.

“We wanted to give people not just a space they could trust for advice on behavior issues or if they are having a crisis with their dog, but also a place where they don’t feel judged to ask questions and admit that maybe it’s a little bit too much for them,” Daphne Mendoza-Tervanis, a cofounder, says.

Sessions are held weekly and span first-time and experienced dog owners, adopters, foster caregivers, and occasionally trainers seeking tips on how to work aggression cases. The meetings are primarily attended by US residents, though previous sessions have attracted dog owners from Singapore, Costa Rica, and beyond.

Jerri Scherff, a cofounder who is 13 years sober, had first-hand experience with recovery programs, and it was important to her that Dogs Anonymous also include some of the same traditions as Alcoholics Anonymous. “We wanted to create something that was repeatable, sustainable, and eventually autonomous, which is the way that recovery groups work,” she says. The most important one was anonymity—what is discussed in the group stays in the group.

The founders say the effectiveness of the group doesn’t necessarily stem from the advice they impart during meetings but comes from members bonding over shared struggles. “The magic of AA the community is that you are going through something that somebody else has either been through or they’re going through the same thing,” Crane adds. This approach, called “sharing your experience, strength and hope,” is a core part of the 12-step recovery program and encourages members to analyze their experience in a way that makes them feel less alone.

According to a survey published in the scientific journal Pets in June examining guilt, burden, and wellbeing among owners of dogs with behavior problems, 53 percent of respondents reported feeling alone, and 78 percent reported “elevated caregiver burden,” a term for the emotional and financial strain of being a caregiver.