A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The state had alleged the company misled users about how it handled their data. Meta says the ruling makes it nearly impossible to do business in the state and plans to appeal. Experts say the fine would give Meta only a mild sting, given the company is worth around $1.7 trillion. Legal pressure may grow as evidence becomes public and litigation shifts towards artificial intelligence.
Australian shares closed marginally higher, even as American technology stocks slid, with Meta leading the decline after investors questioned whether its planned expansion of artificial intelligence spending would generate returns. Oil prices moved sharply upward, with Brent crude climbing above $113 per barrel following fresh Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia and renewed worries about a possible flare-up between Washington and Tehran. Separately, ABC News director Simon Robinson informed employees that The Business program will not be broadcast next year.
A United States federal judge has ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion. A jury found the company guilty of nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws. The penalty followed New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declining to join an $18 billion multistate settlement Meta reached with other states earlier this year. Judge Francis J. Mathew said Meta repeatedly and wilfully misled users about data control, misuse and misinformation since 2010. Meta plans to appeal, arguing the penalty is unconstitutional.
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Meta's advertising revenue growth in Europe slowed in the three months through September, lagging behind North America. Revenue in the region grew 18 percent year-on-year, compared with 33 percent in the US and Canada. Chief financial officer Susan Li had earlier warned that less personalised ads were having an impact in Europe. Meta introduced the less-personalised option earlier this year after EU regulators found it breached digital markets rules. Meta says the option uses 90 percent less data, which it argues leads to weaker returns for advertisers.
Meta has said it will defend itself vigorously against a class action in Australia's Federal Court. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of eight applicants, alleges that addictive design features on Facebook and Instagram harm children and teenagers. It seeks compensation for users exposed to harmful content or who developed a social media addiction. The Federal Court in Sydney has issued a suppression order over details of the claim and the applicants' identities. Separately, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay US$25 billion for misleading consumers, a ruling the company says it will appeal.
Meta plans to create a new class of non-voting stock, to be distributed to existing shareholders as a dividend, to help fund its artificial intelligence push. Chief financial officer Susan Li said the shares would support capital raising, employee pay and acquisitions while preserving the voting power of existing Class A and B shareholders. The company reported third-quarter revenue of $64 billion, up 26 per cent, though costs and expenses rose 68 per cent. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the United States and Canada had set up Muse personal agents within six weeks.
Meta says its AI app Muse has more than 10 million users, and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says shopping is among its most popular uses. About 25% of people who set up Muse use it daily. Over a quarter of engaged users shopping through the agent had an average purchase above $200. Meta plans to keep Muse free for most users while taking a share of commerce on the platform, and expects it to become profitable once it scales.
Westpac has announced job cuts. The union accuses the bank of using NAB's mass redundancy announcement as cover for its own restructure. Separately, the government has extended the pause on KPMG bidding for Australian government work until February 28, 2027, following an independent review and the audit leaks scandal. The Australian share market closed lower after gains on Wall Street.
News publishers around the world are urging regulators to block Meta's changes to its commercial terms before they take effect. A United Kingdom News Media Association chief executive called the move a shameless land grab. The European Publishers Council has asked the European Commission to intervene. In the United States, the head of the News/Media Alliance called the policy outrageous, probably illegal and an abuse of market power. The group said the terms should not be implemented on October 30.
Meta has been asked to identify who approved downloading pirated book collections, known as shadow libraries, used in early AI training. Meta argued that executives did not make formal decisions on such datasets and that no single decision-maker existed. Hixon, representing the authors, rejected those arguments, saying the request covers all decision-makers. Hixon also said Meta must explain what happened to pirated works not used for AI training. Meta and Entrepreneur Media's lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta's AI companion Muse has reached 10 million US downloads in its first 40 days, placing it among only a dozen mobile apps to do so. Market data from Sensor Tower shows 10.9 million total downloads since its September debut. Meta has boosted the app through its other services and by spending heavily on advertising. Muse also shows stronger user retention than rival AI apps such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, and its daily active users reached 2.5 million on October 16. Muse is currently available only in the United States and Canada.
Meta has suspended the sharing feature of Muse, its new general-purpose AI agent, after researchers found it can expose sensitive information. Security firm Claroc said it listed 6,800 shared conversation links, and opening a few hundred revealed private material. The material included an executive-search note, a loan application, a bank fraud alert, a property performance report and a staff vacation calendar. Meta said it is reviewing the issue and considering changes to how the links can be discovered. Claroc said it reported the findings through Meta's bug bounty program on October 8.
Dozens of WhatsApp help pages exposed hidden instructions meant for Meta's chatbot, according to a new analysis by privacy company Redact. The text included guidance not to provide legal advice and not to recommend contacting data protection regulators. Around 80 pages were affected. After WIRED contacted Meta, the text was removed. WhatsApp spokesperson Joshua Breckman said it was shown because of a bug that has now been fixed.
A bug has allowed Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to record without the wearer intending it, even while the indicator light is active. Meta has previously said the light shows when audio or video is being recorded. Contractors for Sama, a Kenya-based data annotation company, say they have viewed footage shot by the glasses, apparently without the wearer or others in the video knowing. The reports have led to a US class action lawsuit and an investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Meta updated the glasses in August so they will not record when the indicator light is covered.
Legal experts warn that Meta's updated commercial terms, taking effect on October 30, could allow the company to train AI on content from businesses' linked websites. Businesses cannot opt out, and the update suggests they stop using Meta services if they refuse. The changes are said to affect all business accounts, with news publishers particularly exposed, as they could otherwise charge Meta millions in licensing fees. Meta says it is only consolidating existing crawling language and that robots.txt instructions still apply.
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Meta has launched Muse Spark Open, an open-weight AI model it calls the most capable of its kind in the United States. The model is designed to run locally on Apple computers, though it needs at least 1 terabyte of RAM and performs best on the Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip. Meta says the model claims better performance than other popular open-weight models, based on its released evaluation results. It has been used for coding fixes, and in DaVinci Resolve it reviewed and cropped footage. Meta is making the model available now through several API platforms.
Meta's AI agent, Muse, produced graphic sexual content during tests by WIRED, and the company says such conversations are permitted for adults. A Meta spokesperson said Muse runs on a private, secure virtual machine accessible only to each user. Muse's system prompt states that adult sexual content is lawful expression. Consumer advocates criticised the decision, and experts warned that intimate chats could be used to embarrass or extort users if accounts are hacked. Rival agents from OpenAI and xAI declined to engage in explicit sexting during the same tests.
Meta's Superintelligence Lab has released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, the company's first frontier AI models. Meta says the larger models score comparably to rival systems on benchmarks and perform better on complex tasks such as coding. Muse Wonder will be sold through Meta's API at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Wonder Full will only be available to Muse Code subscribers. Meta highlighted a memory feature it calls active memory, which it says scores higher on the MemoryBench test than rival models.
Meta has released two new AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, which the company says are among the most capable in the world. Muse Wonder Full is described as having frontier capabilities. Meta says the largest version outperforms Anthropic's second-best model and ranks just below its best on a widely used capability index. The models will be available through an API and a software-writing tool called Muse Code. Meta also says it has trained the models to refuse dangerous requests, though it did not disclose whether agents built on them have misbehaved in testing.
Jessica Hische, a lettering artist from Oakland, faced intense backlash after designing Meta’s new AI assistant Muse’s logo. Despite acknowledging the controversy surrounding AI and Meta, she took the freelance job to support her two brick-and-mortar shops and pay her staff. The criticism escalated on Threads, with designers accusing her of selling out, even after she explained her financial motivations. Hische emphasized that the project was a positive experience and that Meta hired an independent artist rather than using generative AI.
