Bank of America Warns Muse Could Capture the Transactions Behind Apple's Services Revenue
Analyst Wamsi Mohan kept his Buy rating and $370 price target on Apple but warned AI agents like Muse could take transactions away from Apple's ecosystem.
By Icarus3 min read
Bank of America Warns Muse Could Capture the Transactions Behind Apple’s Services Revenue
Analyst Wamsi Mohan kept his Buy rating on Apple, but his note argues the agent, not the operating system, may increasingly decide where iPhone owners shop and pay.
Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan told investors on September 29 that Meta’s Muse poses a new kind of threat to Apple’s services business by sitting between iPhone owners and the purchases they make, rather than by competing with the iPhone on hardware. Apple shares fell more than 2.5% on the day the note was published, 9to5Mac reported.
Mohan kept his Buy rating and $370 price target on Apple, arguing the company still looks like an “eventual winner of AI at the edge.” His warning was about the plumbing of commerce. AI agents like Muse increasingly capture product discovery, referrals, and the initiation of transactions that currently flow through Apple’s ecosystem.
“The risk for Apple is that it can keep every handset sale and still lose discovery, referral, and transaction initiation,” Mohan wrote in the note, as reported by SeekingAlpha.
The Argument in Plain Terms
Mohan’s case rests on how Muse already operates. The agent can browse the web, fill out forms, book travel, send emails, and make purchases on a user’s behalf. Meta has lined up commerce integrations including Shopify and Shop Pay, Expedia, and PayPal, so the agent can carry a shopper from discovery through checkout. Sensor Tower estimates cited by TechCrunch put Muse above 3.4 million downloads in the week before September 29 (the app passed 5 million downloads in its first 22 days), and it spent roughly two weeks at No. 1 among free U.S. App Store apps, overtaking ChatGPT after ten days.
“Whomever the agent chooses becomes the merchant, and whoever owns the agent collects the routing economics that previously accrued to operating systems, search, and app stores,” Mohan wrote, as reported by Yahoo! Finance.
In his telling, the battle for “the economics of user intent” turns on who is present when a user decides what to buy. Apple’s installed base buys the phones; the open question is whether Apple’s software or someone else’s agent is there at that moment. Mohan argued Apple’s Services, silicon, payments, privacy, and Siri AI teams need to move together more quickly to compete for that moment.
Where Siri Stands in His Comparison
The note did not spare Apple’s own assistant. Mohan wrote that the rebuilt Siri, which shipped with iOS 27 on September 14 running on custom Google Gemini models, per Benzinga, still lacks capabilities Muse has now, including persistent background tasks, broad third-party action coverage, and a dedicated agent payment rail. He also pointed to pace. Apple ships major software once a year, while AI agents “improve daily.”
Mohan was comparing announced capabilities; the verdict on outcomes is still open. Mohan gave Apple two structural advantages for the longer run: its massive installed base and its reputation for privacy.
Those matter specifically when the job is convincing people to trust an agent with payments, personal data, and access to their accounts.
Needham arrived at a similar worry from the other direction. On October 1, analyst Laura Martin kept a Hold rating on Apple and said the biggest investment risk for Apple shareholders is that Meta or another AI-first competitor builds an agent, hardware, and monetization stack that disintermediates the iPhone, aistockwire reported. For context, Meta has said Apple’s 2021 App Tracking Transparency feature cost it $10 billion in ad revenue in the following twelve months.
Why It Matters
Mohan’s note is the first major Wall Street thesis to frame Muse as a platform-economics question rather than an app-store curiosity. Meta’s ad business learned the cost of sitting underneath Apple’s rules in 2021; an agent that routes purchases could move some of that value back above them. Whether it does depends on something Mohan’s note can only gesture at. The question is how often iPhone owners hand the decision about merchant, price, and payment to an agent instead of making it themselves. The commerce rails are being built. The habit has yet to form.
