- Key insight: Marketplaces want Muse to work within their parameters
- Forward look: After blocking Muse, Insurify in talks with Meta about how to proceed
Insurance marketplaces are deciding whether to block Meta's Muse AI agent.
In a September 30
Employers, a mid-size workers comp insurance specialist, does not allow third-party AI agents like Muse to access its operational systems or customer data, said Kelley Kage, the company's senior vice president and chief information officer. Employers does build applications within ChatGPT, she added, and the company would require AI tools such as Muse to work within the bounds of its broader AI strategy.
Giorgos Zacharia, co-CEO of Insurify, said when his company tried out Muse, the AI agent acted like a hacker in how it scraped Insurify's insurance marketplace, and then presented insurance premium quotes missing key information.
In response to questions about Insurify's account, a Meta spokesperson replied by email, "We're in touch with Insurify to understand the issue they raised."
Contacted for a follow-up, Zacharia answered by email, "We look forward to collaborating towards a good solution with Muse."
Zacharia said he tested Muse himself by uploading Insurify's policies and asking the agent to shop for insurance. Muse proceeded to work through an embedded browser, did not identify itself, and then presented quotes with meta information about the carriers stripped out of its output, according to Zacharia.
"Muse was working around the cap, the bot detection, answering the captcha questions. When it got stuck, it told me, 'Insurify blocked me. I'm going to keep trying. I'll give a report in a couple of hours if I find another way.' This is not the way to work with us," Zacharia said.
Addressing how this affected Muse's output, he added, "It becomes a price comparison without the consumer knowing what the underlying information and underlying coverage is from each carrier. Every policy, every carrier, every package is a different offer, and the consumer needs to be aware how much coverage they are buying for every dollar that they spend."
Zacharia said Muse should work through a model context protocol or API rather than scraping Insurify's site, and comply with Insurify's terms and conditions. "By not identifying itself, Muse removes the ability of Insurify to decide when we should be guiding this bot to click to the carriers or not," he said. "We have to do right by both the consumer and the carriers. We need to make sure that the clicks to the carriers' websites or the calls into their systems are by real consumers, and quote to bind ratios are healthy and appropriate for real consumers, not the bot shopping around and entering the prices without the right information around it."
