# AI Safety Delays and Meta's SMB Expansion

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-09-30

## Transcript

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Meta's expanding its AI agent Muse to small businesses.
I'm Imran Shaikh and your Daily Crunch for Wednesday starts right now.
OpenAI had planned to release yet another AI model next month, but they've decided to nix the release over safety concerns.
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal reports that Astra 6.1 was scheduled to be released as soon as within the next few days.
However, the model showed higher levels of deception than previous models and exhibited unsafe behavior, the journal writes.
Saatchi Jain, OpenAI's head of safety systems, told The Wall Street Journal that the model tested poorly on alignment, which is a measure of how well the program adheres to human intent.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information and will update this article if it responds.
Now, Astra was released earlier this month and hailed by OpenAI as its most powerful model yet.
Questions about safety have plagued the AI industry over the past several months, ever since the hugging face incident in which an OpenAI agent...
broke free of its sandboxed environment and hacked several different companies.
Since that incident, more models, including Anthropics' Claude and Google's Gemini, have been revealed to have exhibited similar behavior.
Now, the deluge of concerning stories has, ironically, helped to push the policy conversation in the U.S.
toward an outcome desired by top AI labs, the institution of new industry standards for AI safety and potentially a slowdown of the industry itself.
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have claimed that the concern here is safety, although another potential motivation posted by critics is that it could entrench the industry position of those companies at the detriment of less-resourced firms.
As all-in-one AI agents like Meta's Muse and Instinct take off, Google announced it's shutting down the Gemini feature known as GEMS, which had allowed users to build custom AI assistants for specific tasks.
However, the work users invested in creating the Gems won't be destroyed.
Gems will be automatically migrated to skills that can be used across different AI tasks.
Now, details about the change are being shared in the Gemini app, where a message warns users that Gems will become skills starting on November 17th, 2026.
The company said it'll migrate the Gems to the new format, so users won't have to do anything to make the transition.
The Gems themselves will remain usable until then.
Now, launched in 2024, gems were meant to help users teach their AI to perform certain tasks without having to repeat the instructions.
For instance, some of Google's pre-made gems had included a learning coach, a brainstorming assistant, a career guide, a coding partner, and an editor.
Users could also make Gems for their own needs, like a running coach, nutritionist, or vacation planner.
These custom assistants could also be shared with others, which Google had hoped would help make its Gemini AI app more popular.
The news of Gems shutdown is just another example of why Google shouldn't be so quick to give every new AI feature its own brand name, icon, and prominent placement in its app's navigation.
Especially if it's going to shuffle things around over time, merging one feature into another.
To be clear, this has been a failing point of Google's strategy long before the AI era.
At one point, for instance, the company was operating multiple different messaging and communication apps at the same time.
Yet.
Even as skills, the former gems, still aren't as consumer-friendly as just typing in text to a chatbot like Meta's Muse.
Instead, Google notes you'll have to enter a forward slash in a task thread to select the skill you want to use, a user interface that engineers, not us regular mortal folk, tend to prefer.
Meta announced on Tuesday that it's expanding its AI agent Muse to small businesses and adding new integrations including Shopify, Dropbox, Slack, and a whole bunch more.
The tech giant saying the agent can help owners run their business and find new customers.
By plugging Muse into the software that small business owners are already using to manage sales, operations, and marketing, Meta is betting that an AI agent with context of a company's whole operation will be more useful than a standalone chatbot as it continues to compete against rivals like OpenAI and Google.
Muse can also link to Instagram professional account analytics, Facebook pages, and Meta ad accounts.
Meta says the AI agent also knows what a business sells, how a brand sounds, and what customers ask about most.
Meta says the AI agent also knows what a business sells, how a brand sounds, and what customers ask about most.
Additional integrations include Asana, Box, Canva, Figma, Granola, HighLevel, Intuit, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Lovable, Notion, Stripe, and Zoom.
Muse for small business is available for free with usage limits.
Businesses that want more usage can purchase a subscription plan.
Small businesses have been growing on our apps for nearly two decades, Meta wrote in a blog post, continuing, They told us they're shot on ours, not ideas.
So we built Muse for small business to help get work done with the tools they already use.
Meta has been focused on expanding its AI tools beyond the consumer and into the enterprise market.
I mean, the launch of Muse for small business comes a day after Meta introduced Meta Enterprise Platform, a new initiative aimed at expanding the company's AI offerings to businesses and corporate customers.
The move could help Meta see a return on all the money it's pouring into AI.
Meta says it'll focus on bringing its full technology stack, including Muse, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers.
The rollout of Meta Enterprise Platform is built on the momentum of Muse, which launched earlier this month and topped the US and Canada app charts ahead of ChatGPT.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Lucas Ropec, Sarah Perez, Aisha Malek, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
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