Meta secretly routed some Muse phone calls to human contractors instead of AI, then rolled it back after a contractor's racist remark

Meta (internal employee beta test)·Meta Muse (calling feature / 'human concierge')Fixed

Meta enabled a 'human concierge' mode for roughly half its employees in which trained contractors silently placed and handled Muse's phone-call tasks (e.g., negotiating bills) instead of the AI, without disclosing to the employee or the business called that a human, not Muse, was on the line.

Blast radius

Tested on about half of Meta's staff; one contractor made a racist remark while negotiating an employee's internet/cable bill, and employees warned that sensitive personal information could leak to call-center contractors without disclosure.

Root cause

AI-only call success rates reportedly lagged well behind human-handled calls (95–98% vs. much lower), so Meta substituted undisclosed human labor for the advertised 'AI agent' experience without updating consent or disclosures.

How it was caught

Internal employee complaints and leaked internal posts, reported externally by Reuters and 404 Media.

What changed

Meta rolled back the human-concierge calling feature, banned the contractor involved from future Meta projects, apologized to the affected employee, and said any public release would require proper disclosures and safeguards.

Take-awaySecretly backing an 'AI agent' feature with undisclosed human operators is a trust and disclosure failure in itself — fix the model or disclose the human, don't hide it.