Meta is building a consumer-friendly AI assistant — codenamed "Hatch" — and plans to launch a standalone shopping agent inside Instagram by the end of this year.
Hatch is Meta's attempt to take the kind of agentic AI tools that have been locked away in developer sandboxes and turn them into something you can actually use without a computer science degree. The project is currently powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 models — the same ones that were recently beaten by an open model from Mistral in some benchmarks — but will switch to Meta's own Muse Spark model at launch. To test it, Meta built a "sandbox" environment with real sites like DoorDash, Etsy, and Reddit, focusing on autonomous decision-making and cross-conversation memory. Internal testing is expected to begin by the end of June.
On the e-commerce side, Meta's Instagram shopping agent is a direct shot at TikTok Shop. When you tap a product in a video or feed, the agent can navigate to an external site and complete the purchase without you lifting a finger. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that existing open-source agents are so bad that "not one of them is something I'd trust with my mom."
But trust is exactly the problem. Meta has a long way to go before these agents are safe enough for mainstream use. The company's own employees once followed bad advice from an internal agent called "MyClaw," triggering a sensitive data leak. Hatch and the Instagram shopping bot will have to prove they can do better.