Apple (AAPL) has spent this year fending off worries about falling behind in the AI race. For the most part, investors have been willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt. This time, a different kind of warning surfaced, one that has nothing to do with chips, silicon, or how smart Apple’s own AI actually is.
It came from one of Apple’s most reliable supporters on Wall Street, who kept his bullish rating firmly in place while describing a shift that could quietly drain value from the business for years without a single iPhone sale changing hands.
BofA says Apple could win every phone sale and still lose the app that matters
Bank of America kept its Buy rating and $370 price target on Apple. Analyst Wamsi Mohan did not cut the stock. What he did do was describe a specific way Apple could lose ground without losing a single iPhone sale. Discovery. Referral. Transaction initiation.
Apple shares slipped roughly 2% after the note landed, according to 24/7 Wall St.
The concern centers on who controls that decision point once an AI agent starts making it, instead of the user opening an app. Mohan wrote that whoever owns the agent collects the routing economics that previously accrued to operating systems, search engines, and app stores.
He pointed to Meta’s (META) Muse assistant and its expanding list of commerce partners, including Shopify, Expedia, and PayPal, as early signs of how that model could shift.
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Not every retailer is playing along. Amazon blocked Muse from operating on its marketplace within days of launch, citing unauthorized access and concerns over how the agent interacted with the site.
Shopify moved in the opposite direction and opened its full catalog and Shopify Pay to the agent, sending Shopify shares up more than 7% on the day the partnership was announced, Benzinga reported.
Mohan is not calling this a sell. He still has Apple winning the long AI race at the device level. The installed base is real. The privacy advantage is real. His argument is about what happens in the gap between now and when Apple closes it.
Muse’s rapid rise is what’s forcing the reassessment
Muse launched on September 8 as a personal AI agent capable of sending emails, booking travel, handling purchases, and coordinating a user’s schedule largely on its own, running on a dedicated virtual machine that continues to run even after the user closes the app.
The app climbed to the number one spot on Apple’s own U.S. App Store chart within its first two weeks, passing 2.5 million downloads. A pace fast enough that JPMorgan compared it to ChatGPT’s early trajectory, the fastest-growing consumer app in history at the time of its 2022 launch, Benzinga reported.
Even Bank of America does not expect Muse to generate meaningful revenue from ads, subscriptions, or commissions before 2028. The near-term threat to Apple is more about changes in user behavior. The question is where consumers form purchase intent, not how many dollars change hands immediately.
That distinction matters for how Meta is being valued, too. Bank of America has kept its Buy rating on Meta intact, partly because Muse is reshaping how investors view the company’s AI spending. Even Meta faces a decision about whether to use its limited computing capacity for products like Muse or to lease that capacity to outside customers.
Even Bank of America does not expect Muse to generate meaningful revenue from ads, subscriptions, or commissions before 2028.
Apple’s own AI response has gaps agents are exploiting
Apple’s answer so far is an updated Siri built on Apple Foundation Models and Private Cloud Compute, released alongside iOS 27.
Mohan noted it currently lacks some of Muse’s background task capabilities and broader ability to take third-party actions on a user’s behalf, 9to5Mac reported.
This is not a new argument for Mohan. Back in May, he raised his Apple price target on the idea that agentic AI favors platforms that already control user intent, context, app access, identity, payments, and trust. Apple’s tight grip on its silicon and operating system gives it exactly that kind of control, he argued.
The hardware side of Apple’s business still looks solid heading into this debate. Morgan Stanley said that 14 days after iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max pre-orders opened, global lead times remained broadly flat year over year, even though Apple had built 18% more premium units, Investing.com reported.
Retail investors have not fully caught up to that read. Even with Apple ranking as the best-performing Mag-7 stock so far in 2026, sentiment on Stocktwits has remained stuck in bearish territory.
What this means for Apple’s long game in AI
Bank of America has laid out a handful of catalysts it is watching across Meta’s own AI buildout, including how quickly Muse adoption converts into paid features and how Meta’s custom chip strategy affects the cost of running these agents at scale.
Apple is not in crisis. iPhones are still selling. Services revenue is still growing. The risk Mohan is pointing at is quieter than that. It is about who owns what happens after someone unlocks their phone.
What it does mean is that the fight for Apple’s next decade of growth may increasingly be decided by which company owns the moment a customer decides what to do next. Not by which company sells them the device they are holding when they decide it.
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