🔶 Meta 的 Muse Agent 正在冲击经济中最赚钱的薄弱环节之一
英文标题：🔶 Meta's Muse agent is attacking one of the economy's most profitable weak spots
Meta 本月推出的个人 AI Agent Muse 可帮助用户识别并取消自动续费订阅，直指消费者“容易订阅、难以取消”的行为惯性。研究显示，消费者惯性与取消流程摩擦可使订阅商家的收入大致翻倍；美国消费者 2025 年平均年度订阅支出已升至 1,887 美元。对开发者和订阅业务而言，AI Agent 普及可能提高取消率、削弱依赖沉没用户的收入模式，并迫使企业通过暂停订阅、分层服务和更清晰的价值展示留住客户。其影响还可能延伸至银行低成本存款等金融服务核心环节，不过隐私、平台访问权限及用户信任仍是关键挑战。
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中文
多年来，订阅业务一直受益于一个简单的消费者行为事实：人们注册订阅的能力远强于取消订阅。
他们会忘记自己订了什么。他们不再使用服务，却仍在持续付费。每月 9 美元或 15 美元的费用，可能会在信用卡账单中隐没数月，甚至数年。
随着本月 Meta Muse 的推出，这款可处理个人生活多个领域任务的 AI 个人 Agent 很快表明，订阅膨胀是一个容易切入的目标。
Muse 可以帮助消费者识别并取消周期性订阅。尽管订阅管理服务已存在多年，但 Muse 将这项能力纳入了覆盖范围更广的个人助理之中，可能让那些被遗忘的周期性扣费更容易被发现和取消。
而时机很重要。万事达卡和 FT Strategies 于 4 月发布的一份报告显示，2025 年近半数（44%）美国消费者增加了订阅支出，平均年度支出升至 1,887 美元，即每月约 157 美元。根据美国银行支付数据，7 月订阅支出同比增长 7.7%，增速快于整体刷卡支出；其中娱乐和零售订阅约占总额的 43%。
斯坦福大学经济学教授、斯坦福经济政策研究所所长 Neale Mahoney 一直在研究：当消费者未能取消订阅时，订阅企业究竟能获得多大收益。
“我们发现，当人们被迫作出决定时，他们取消订阅的可能性大约会提高四倍，”Mahoney 表示。他援引了自己与斯坦福经济学家 Liran Einav、Ben Klopack 合著的 2025 年《美国经济评论》论文《Selling Subscriptions》中的数据。
在 AI Agent 的世界里，这一区别至关重要。
斯坦福研究人员估计，消费者惯性——即人们忘记或拖延取消——以及取消摩擦——即终止订阅需要花费过多时间或精力——可以让卖家的收入大致翻倍。Mahoney 表示，AI 个人 Agent 可能同时削弱这两种因素。但并非所有订阅都同样脆弱。他说，实物订阅，例如宠物食品，由于产品持续送到家门口，因此很难被遗忘；而数字服务，例如信用监控，则可能在消费者早已不再关注后，仍悄然持续扣费。
最终，AI 个人 Agent 对这种消费者心理的介入，可能产生远超订阅领域的影响，并深入影响如今银行习以为常的核心金融服务决策。
“Muse 和类似的 Agentic AI 助手，很快可能会自动将家庭现金归集到支付 3.3% 至 5.0% 利率的账户中，而不是留在全国平均利率仅为 0.1% 的活期账户里。如果每个家庭都使用 AI Agent 优化其现金余额的回报，银行可能失去其用于发放贷款所依赖的大量低成本存款，这将成为整个金融系统的问题，”Apollo 首席经济学家 Torsten Slok 上周在一篇分析文章中写道。
“生活中越来越多的事正在变成周期性账单”
消费者本就开始更积极地削减订阅。
为银行、信用合作社和金融科技公司将订阅管理技术嵌入银行应用的 ScribeUp 表示，其会员现在发起取消订阅的可能性是去年同期的 1.8 倍。
“生活中越来越多的事正在变成周期性账单。这些账单每年都在变贵，消费者要追踪自己支付的所有费用也变得愈发困难，”该公司联合创始人兼 CEO Jordan Mackler 表示。他说，这一增长早于 ScribeUp 新增 AI 功能，反映的是消费者行为的更广泛变化。
该公司表示，ScribeUp 用户目前的周期性订阅付款中位数超过 12 笔，四分之一用户拥有 20 笔或更多订阅。此外，拥有至少 8 笔订阅付款的用户比例，在过去一年中从 62% 升至 71%。
涨价会加速用户流失。Mackler 表示，当价格上涨时，单个商家的取消量最多可飙升 50%。他称，健康和健身订阅的取消活动增幅最为明显，同比增长 3.8 倍；其后依次为视频流媒体（2.2 倍）、新闻和媒体（2.1 倍），以及音乐流媒体（1.9 倍）。
Mackler 表示，AI 正在扩大 ScribeUp 可帮助消费者管理的订阅数量。该公司目前追踪约 20 万个独特的周期性收费商家。在今年引入更新的 Agentic 能力之前，它只能为数百家大型订阅公司自动执行取消操作。
平均每项被取消的订阅每月费用为 17.39 美元。Mackler 表示，ScribeUp 平均每年为用户节省超过 300 美元，这些费用来自用户没有意识到自己仍在支付、或已经不再需要的周期性账单。
遗忘的高成本经济学将终结？
订阅公司已经在应对显著的客户流失。万事达卡报告发现，平均月流失率——即在某个月取消或未续订的订阅者比例——为 20%。但接受调查的美国订阅企业中，超过半数表示，至少 10% 的订阅用户处于非活跃状态，也就是说，这些客户仍然订阅，却并未积极使用服务。
随着消费者对周期性扣费获得更多控制权，订阅公司可能需要更加努力地竞争以留住他们。
专注于产品驱动增长和客户留存的 Zendesk 首席产品经理 Hitee Chandra Jha 表示，企业可能需要在客户进入取消页面之前，就让价值变得更加可见。
对于一些公司而言，这可能意味着不能把取消视为非此即彼的事件。Jha 表示，如果流媒体服务的客户已经看完一部剧，与其拼命提供折扣，不如提供暂停订阅选项。她说，已经达成健身目标的 App 用户，可以被转入维持型套餐，或获得另一条保持参与度的路径。
订阅管理公司 Recurly 的数据表明，这类灵活性可能奏效。其基于超过 2,200 家企业、7,600 万名独立订阅者的《2026 年订阅状况报告》发现，“取消前暂停”选项的使用量增长了 337%，而暂停订阅的客户中，四分之三最终会回归。
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg 将 Muse 设想为其 AI 战略的“核心”，其周围将配置一系列尚未得到验证的消费级硬件，从增强现实眼镜到类似钥匙扣吊坠的 Muse Charm 设备。但这是市场近期已通过股价表现予以回报的一项押注。
这款 AI 已遭遇亚马逊的阻击。亚马逊禁止 Muse 在其网站购物，称该 Agent 的访问行为违反服务条款。当用户向 AI 授予财务信息访问权限时，隐私问题同样令人担忧。不过，根据 Recurly 数据，43% 的消费者表示，他们愿意让 AI 管理自己的订阅。
“将取消视为一种转变，而不只是一次损失，是成熟留存策略与防御性策略之间的区别，”Jha 表示。“针对 AI 辅助取消的最佳防御措施并不是设置摩擦，”她补充说。
万事达卡的研究也指向相同结论。受访消费者中，74% 表示，如果取消过程简单，他们更可能订阅；70% 表示，他们更可能再次订阅。另有 34% 表示，如果被提供暂停而非取消的选项，他们会继续维持订阅。
AI 未必意味着订阅增长的终结；相反，它可能会迫使企业寻找新方式，让客户相信服务的价值。
ScribeUp 观察到，一旦用户确信账户中的周期性扣费确实都是自己主动选择的项目，他们会对订阅整体感到更放心，并增加总订阅支出。
“如果消费者相信自己能够轻松查看、管理和取消周期性扣费，我们的数据表明，他们很可能扩大整体周期性消费，并且从一开始就更愿意尝试新服务，”Mackler 表示。
Mahoney 认为，更健康的市场应催生不依赖于拖慢消费者决策、而是为消费者提供更多按自身条件留下来的方式的企业。“当人们被困在自己不想要、或无法退出的订阅中时，市场力量就会受到限制，企业也没有动力以低价格提供高质量产品。它们只需依赖被锁定的既有用户群，”他说。
无论是 AI 还是消费者主动采取行动，当人们不再为自己不想要的东西付费、转而将这笔钱花在其他地方时，“这对消费者有利，对市场有利，也对那些生产人们真正想要产品的企业有利，”Mahoney 表示。“这才是经济应有的运作方式。”
English / 原文
For years, subscription businesses have benefited from a simple fact of consumer behavior: people are much better at signing up than canceling.
They forget what they joined. They stop using services but keep paying. A $9 or $15 monthly charge can disappear into a credit card statement for months or even years.
With the rollout of Meta Muse this month, an AI personal agent that can handle tasks across many areas of personal life, it quickly became clear that subscription bloat was an easy target.
Muse can help consumers identify and cancel recurring subscriptions. While subscription-management services have existed for years, Muse brings that capability into a much broader personal assistant, potentially making forgotten recurring charges much easier to surface and cancel.
And the timing matters. Close to half (44%) of U.S. consumers increased their subscription spending in 2025, with average annual spending rising to $1,887, or about $157 a month, according to a report published by Mastercard and FT Strategies in April. Subscription spend rose 7.7% year-over-year in July, faster than overall card spending, according to Bank of America payments data, with entertainment and retail subscriptions accounting for about 43% of the total.
Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, has studied how much subscription businesses benefit when consumers fail to cancel.
"We found that when people are forced to decide, they are about four times more likely to cancel," Mahoney said, citing data from his 2025 American Economic Review paper "Selling Subscriptions," co-authored with Stanford economists Liran Einav and Ben Klopack.
That distinction matters in an AI agent world.
The Stanford researchers estimated that sellers can roughly double revenue because of consumer inertia, when people forget or put off canceling, and cancellation friction, when ending a subscription takes too much time or effort. AI personal agents could weaken both, Mahoney said. But not every subscription is equally vulnerable. A physical subscription, such as pet food, is hard to forget when the product keeps arriving at your door, he said, while a digital service, such as credit monitoring, can quietly keep billing long after a consumer stops thinking about it.
Ultimately, the AI personal agent's intervention with this consumer psychology could have implications far beyond the subscription and influence decision-making deep within the core financial services that banks take for granted today.
"Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system," Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok wrote in an analysis last week.
'More of life is becoming a recurring bill'
Consumers already were becoming more aggressive about cutting subscriptions.
ScribeUp, which builds subscription-management technology into banking apps for banks, credit unions, and fintech companies, says its members are now 1.8 times more likely to initiate a cancellation than they were a year ago.
"More of life is becoming a recurring bill. Those bills cost more every year, and it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to keep track of everything they are paying for," said Jordan Mackler, the company's co-founder and CEO. He said that increase predates ScribeUp's newer AI capabilities and reflects a broader change in consumer behavior.
According to the company, the median ScribeUp user now has more than 12 recurring subscription payments, while 1 in 4 has 20 or more. In addition, the share of users with at least eight rose from 62% to 71% over the past year.
Price hikes can accelerate the exit. Mackler said cancellations at an individual merchant can jump as much as 50% when prices rise. Health and fitness subscriptions have seen the sharpest increase in cancellation activity, up 3.8 times year-over-year, followed by video streaming at 2.2 times, news and media at 2.1 times, and music streaming at 1.9 times, said Mackler.
Mackler said AI is increasing the number of subscriptions ScribeUp can help consumers manage. The company currently tracks roughly 200,000 unique recurring billers. Before adding its newer agentic capabilities this year, it could automate cancellations for only a few hundred major subscription companies.
The average canceled subscription costs $17.39 a month, and Mackler said ScribeUp saves users more than $300 a year on average on recurring bills they didn't realize they were paying for or no longer needed.
An end to the costly economics of forgetting?
Subscription companies are already dealing with significant customer turnover. The Mastercard report found average monthly churn — the percentage of subscribers who cancel or fail to renew in a given month — is 20%. But more than half of U.S. subscription businesses surveyed said at least 10% of their subscriber base was inactive, meaning those customers were still subscribed but were not actively using the service.
As consumers gain more control over recurring charges, subscription companies may need to compete harder to keep them.
Hitee Chandra Jha, principal product manager at Zendesk who specializes in product-led growth and customer retention, said companies may need to make value more visible before a customer reaches the cancellation screen.
For some companies, that could mean treating cancellation less as an all-or-nothing event. Jha said a streaming service whose customer has finished watching a series might be better off offering a pause rather than a desperate discount. A fitness-app user who has reached a goal could be moved to a maintenance tier or offered another path to stay engaged, she said.
Data from subscription-management company Recurly suggests that kind of flexibility can work. In its 2026 State of Subscriptions report, based on 76 million unique subscribers across more than 2,200 businesses, it found that the use of "pause before cancel" options jumped 337%, and three out of four customers who paused eventually returned.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions Muse as the "centerpiece" of an AI strategy that will be surrounded by still unproven consumer hardware, from augmented reality glasses to the Muse Charm keychain fob-like device, but it is a bet that the market has recently rewarded the company for making.
The AI has encountered pushback from Amazon, which blocked Muse from shopping on its site, saying the agent's access violated its terms of service. There are also significant concerns about privacy when giving an AI access to financial information. But 43% of consumers said they are comfortable with AI managing their subscriptions, according to the Recurly data.
"Treating cancellation as a transition, not just a loss, is what differentiates a mature retention strategy from a defensive one," Jha said. "The best defense against AI-assisted cancellation is not friction," she added.
Mastercard's research points in the same direction. Of the consumers surveyed, 74% said they are more likely to subscribe when cancellation is easy, while 70% said they are more likely to resubscribe. Another 34% said they would remain subscribed if they were given the option to pause rather than cancel.
Instead of spelling the end of subscription growth, AI could instead put more pressure on companies to find new ways to convince customers of value.
ScribeUp has seen that once users trust that the recurring charges on their accounts are the ones they actually chose, they become more comfortable with subscriptions overall and increase their total subscription spending.
"If consumers trust that they can easily see, manage, and cancel recurring charges, our data shows they are likely to expand their overall recurring spend and are more willing to try new services in the first place," Mackler said.
According to Mahoney, a healthier market should produce businesses that don't rely on ways to slow consumers down but give them more ways to stay on their own terms. "When people are trapped in subscriptions they don't want or can't get out of, market forces are limited, and companies don't have the incentives to have a high-quality product at a low price. They can just rely on a locked-in install base," he said.
Whether it is AI or the consumer taking action, when people stop paying for something they no longer want and spend that money elsewhere, "that's good for consumers, it's good for markets, and it's good for firms that are making products that people want," Mahoney said. "That's economics working the way it's supposed to work."