A New York Times Reporter Gave Muse Two Weeks of His Life. It Cancelled His Subscriptions and Got Him a $44.99 Refund
Eli Tan's hands-on test of Meta's personal AI agent cancelled duplicate subscriptions and secured a $44.99 refund; the same week, Goldman Sachs warned subscription-heavy industries could come under pressure.
By Icarus3 min read
Eli Tan’s hands-on test of Meta’s personal AI agent cancelled duplicate subscriptions and secured a $44.99 refund; the same week, Goldman Sachs warned subscription-heavy industries could come under pressure.
The short version
- New York Times journalist Eli Tan tested Muse for two weeks and called it “the most useful app [he’s] ever used.”
- His agent cancelled two duplicate subscriptions, won a $44.99 refund on an expired free trial, and haggled on Facebook Marketplace.
- CNBC, Axios, and Goldman Sachs are now treating agentic subscription cancellation as a threat to the recurring-revenue business model.
Two weeks of handing his digital life to Meta’s Muse convinced New York Times journalist Eli Tan. Tan nicknamed his agent Wren and put it through dozens of day-to-day tasks, from ordering groceries to looking up recipes to setting his fantasy football lineups, according to his account of the test as recounted in coverage this week. He called it “the most useful app [he’s] ever used”.
The most concrete results came from money chores. Tan had Muse audit his spending: it found and cancelled two duplicate subscriptions and secured a $44.99 refund from a newspaper free trial that had quietly converted to paid billing. It also haggled with sellers on Facebook Marketplace on his behalf, per a detailed account of the test. None of it required him to open a web page or write a message himself.
The subscription economy is paying attention
Tan’s experiment landed in a week when the business world started pricing in this behavior. CNBC reported on September 27 that Muse’s subscription-cancellation feature is making subscription-dependent companies nervous, and Axios reported a slump in subscription-heavy stocks the week before. Goldman Sachs warned that industries relying on recurring bills, negotiable pricing, and add-ons could come under pressure as agents start doing the haggling and the cancelling for consumers.
Other users report the same pattern. Podcaster Carlos Diaz said Muse cancelled unused subscriptions and recommended cheaper services, saving him $2,300 over a weekend, per L’Express Europe. Earlier reports described Muse users cancelling hundreds of dollars a year in recurring charges after simply handing the agent their card statements.
Why it matters
The NYT test is the first time a major newsroom’s hands-on review has put a documented dollar figure on Muse’s agentic spending power, and it answers the question every skeptic asks about AI agents: what does it actually do that a chatbot can’t? It does the retention-offer gauntlet, the survey screens, and the “are you sure?” confirmations: the parts of commerce designed to make a human give up.
There is a wrinkle the numbers-first telling skips. The same agent that cancels your subscriptions is going to start helping you buy things, and every purchase it makes moves toward the transaction fees and advertising revenue Meta ultimately wants from Muse. The consumer-power story and the Meta-monetization story are the same story, just told from different seats, as the trust dynamics around pre-funded agent spending wallets show.
The practical takeaway is the one Tan’s test demonstrates. The friction that keeps unwanted subscriptions alive, the forgetfulness and the hassle, is exactly what agents are built to burn through. That is good news for consumers, and an open question for every business whose margins depend on it.
