Meta stock jumps 11% to about $741 as its Muse AI agent draws Wall Street praise and an Amazon block

Meta Platforms shares rose about 11.4% to $741.13 in Monday afternoon trading, according to Nasdaq data at 1:52 PM ET, as investors piled into the company's new Muse AI agent story two days before its annual Connect event. The move puts Meta at the front of a tech rally that has lifted the Nasdaq Composite about 2.1% on the day.

At that price Meta is worth about $1.89 trillion, Nasdaq data show. Trading was heavy: nearly 30 million shares had changed hands by early afternoon, against a daily average of about 17.7 million.

What is driving it

The trigger in the morning was an analyst call. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised his price target on Meta to $796 from $640 and kept an overweight rating, The Motley Fool reported. The call came ahead of Meta Connect, the company's two-day developer event that starts Wednesday, where Muse is expected to be the centerpiece.

Muse is the product behind the enthusiasm. Meta launched it on September 8 as a personal agent that carries out multi-step tasks, such as shopping or managing a calendar, rather than just answering questions. It is free with paid tiers and runs on iOS, Android, the web and WhatsApp. Investing.com described Monday's buying as a bet that consumer AI agents have reached a mainstream tipping point, and the same theme sent processor makers such as Arm, Intel and AMD sharply higher. We covered that side of the move in AMD tops $1 trillion as Intel and Arm rally.

The gain extends a strong run. Meta closed August at $572.34, so Monday's price is roughly 29% above where the month began. The stock is still below its 52-week high of $790.80.

The Amazon standoff

Not all of the Muse news was friendly. Amazon has blocked the agent from making purchases on Amazon.com, GeekWire first reported. Since Sunday night, shoppers trying to buy through Muse have seen a message saying continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use.

Amazon says Meta never got its agreement, that Muse does not identify itself while browsing, and that it appears to store customer credentials. "Third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate," an Amazon spokesperson said, according to GeekWire and Quartz. Meta has said previously that Muse has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods.

The dispute matters because it is a test of who owns the customer when a machine does the shopping. Amazon earns a large advertising business from people browsing its pages, and it has already moved against shopping agents from Perplexity, Google and OpenAI. The two companies are also partners: GeekWire noted that Meta signed a deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon's Graviton chips. Amazon told GeekWire it is talking directly with Meta and declined to say whether it would sue. Investors shrugged off the dispute on Monday; Amazon shares were up about 1.8% at midday.

What traders are watching

• Connect, starting Wednesday. The event is Meta's chance to show how many people actually use Muse. Much of Monday's move rests on expectations for that update.
• Whether other retailers follow Amazon. An agent that cannot shop at the largest US online store is less useful, and more blocks would weaken the pitch.
• Spending. Agents are expensive to run. Investors will want to hear how Meta plans to pay for the computing power that wider Muse use would need.

For how the AI trade is moving other large companies, see our explainers on Nvidia and Apple, or the stocks section for the latest.

Sources: Nasdaq quote and historical data (read 1:52 PM ET), Meta Newsroom, GeekWire, Quartz, The Motley Fool, Investing.com. Prices are intraday and will change. This is market information, not investment advice.