A public ribbing match between OpenAI, Meta and SpaceX employees has broken out on X, and it’s a useful window into just how shaky the AI agent hype cycle has gotten in the last few weeks.
The exchange started when Tibo Sottiaux, a researcher at OpenAI working on the company’s dots agent, posted a recruiting call-out: “DM if you want to help scale dots to 1B users and have done similar things in the past.” It picked up over half a million views and thousands of likes, the kind of tweet that is engineered to be a flex as much as a job posting.
Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang couldn’t resist. “oops you misspelled muse,” he replied, a dig referencing Meta’s own agent, which has spent the past seven weeks dominating app store charts and, for a while, out-downloading ChatGPT itself.
Tibo came back swinging: “Step 1: Quit posting butts and go buy containers. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Celebrate your 12 users.” The “containers” line is a jab at Meta’s enormous data center buildout for AI compute, while “posting butts” appears to reference Meta’s recent marketing pushes around Muse’s plush-toy mascot. The tweet pulled in over 1,600 likes and 140 replies within hours.
Wang fired back roughly two hours later with “ahem, is the implication you have under 12 users?” — attaching a screenshot of the App Store’s “Top Downloaded” productivity chart, with Muse sitting at No. 1, ChatGPT at No. 2, Claude at No. 3 and Gemini at No. 4. It’s a pointed shot: whatever OpenAI’s dots is doing internally, Muse is still the one topping the download charts.
SpaceX entered the thread almost as comic relief. Lauren, who goes by @poteto and lists SpaceX in her bio, replied with an image showing Muse and OpenAI fighting among each other, while Grok Bot sits in the background “cooking”.
The subtext: agent hype is cooling off
The sniping is funny on its own, but it’s landing at an awkward moment for all three companies’ agent ambitions. Six weeks ago, AI agents that could book travel, send emails and shop on a user’s behalf were being treated as the next paradigm shift. Now the numbers suggest the initial rush is fading, and the obstacles that early adopters are running into are proving harder to wave away than expected.
Muse, which launched on September 8, is the clearest case study. The app raced to over 10 million US downloads within 40 days, a pace that beat ChatGPT, Claude and Grok to the same milestone by a wide margin, and Meta leaned hard into advertising to keep that streak going. But the momentum has visibly slowed: average daily downloads fell to roughly 165,000 in the week ending October 7, an 8.1% drop from the week before, while new app reviews fell even faster. The slowdown was significant enough that short-seller Hunterbrook Capital cited it when disclosing a new short position against Meta on October 9, arguing that market enthusiasm around Muse had outpaced what the underlying usage data showed.
The bigger problem is structural, not just a dip in curiosity. Over the past couple of weeks, a growing list of banks, retailers and travel sites have started actively locking AI agents out of the parts of their platforms where real transactions happen — Amazon, JPMorgan, Schwab and Delta have all restricted outside AI agents in one form or another. Amazon has been blocking Muse from checking out on its site since September 20. JPMorgan and Schwab won’t let outside agents log into customer accounts or move money, citing fraud risk and the possibility that an autonomous agent could start shuffling deposits toward higher-yield accounts at scale. Delta says it simply has no third-party booking integration for agents to plug into. The pattern isn’t unique to Muse either — users of OpenAI’s dots and Instinct, along with xAI’s Grok, report hitting the same walls on an expanding list of sites.
That’s the awkward backdrop against which Tibo, Wang and the rest of the industry are trading jokes about user counts and server rooms. Everyone building a consumer AI agent right now is chasing the same download charts and fighting the same wall of sites that don’t want autonomous software acting on their platforms without permission. The banter on X might be entertaining, but it’s happening while the actual product category it’s about is running into exactly the kind of real-world friction that was easy to dismiss back when the download numbers were only going up.
For now, dots, Muse and whatever SpaceX is cooking up on the agent front are all still very much works in progress — and if the last few weeks are any indication, winning the download chart war might turn out to be the easy part.