Meta on Thursday released a standalone Meta AI app for Mac, the latest step in the social media giant’s renewed effort to promote its AI tools. The app is currently in beta and is free to use for anyone with a Meta account. It extends an assistant that already lives inside WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, that Meta began offering as a standalone app and on the web in April 2025, and that the company said in July had surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. Like the rest of Meta AI, the Mac app runs on Meta’s own Llama models.

Although Meta bills it as a “personal assistant that gets things done,” the company is steering the Mac app toward small business owners and media creators, highlighting several features aimed at their workflows. The focus plays to Meta’s core business: advertising supplies the overwhelming majority of the company’s revenue. Users with professional Facebook or Instagram accounts can connect Meta AI to Google Workspace and manage documents and spreadsheets. The assistant also works in tandem with Meta Ads to deliver audits and optimize campaigns.

Meta says business owners can ask the AI questions about their operations and receive answers drawn from context the company already holds, such as account engagement and ad performance — a capability that also enables benchmarking against similar brands.

Two features are unique to the Mac version. The first allows users to share an on-screen window with the assistant, giving the app access to what they are working on so that it can, according to Meta, provide specific advice and insights. The second enables users to dictate by voice in any app. With the release, Meta arrives on desktop after its biggest rivals: OpenAI shipped a ChatGPT app for macOS in 2024 and added a Windows version months later, while Anthropic offers desktop apps for its Claude assistant.

Meta AI remains free to use, on Mac or elsewhere, but the company is testing usage limits on what it describes as its more compute-intensive features. Once a daily or monthly limit is reached, users will be offered the opportunity to buy a subscription. Paid tiers are already the norm at OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Meta subscription would give the company a way to offset the tens of billions of dollars a year it is spending on the data centers and chips needed to run AI at scale.

The Mac app is the latest in a series of measures intended to increase interest in Meta’s AI capabilities. In June, the company released Business Agent, designed to help companies by automating tasks such as handling customer inquiries, scheduling appointments and recommending products. Last month, Meta rolled out Muse Image, an AI tool to help small and medium-sized businesses create ad campaigns — although one of its key features was swiftly axed following some public negative feedback. Earlier this month came the arrival of Muse Code, a coding agent Meta pitched as an alternative to OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code.

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