You can now use Meta AI in Threads DMs

Meta AI Threads DMs are live. Meta told press Sunday the global rollout follows community feedback from users who wanted more "context" from the AI without sharing conversations publicly. Users can now forward Threads posts, images, links, or videos directly into a one-on-one Meta AI conversation and ask follow-up questions in private.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp had Meta AI in DMs already. Threads is last. Meta says the private channel gives users "greater flexibility in how and where they interact with Meta AI" - someone can share a post they found confusing, forward it to the chatbot, and get an explanation without tagging @meta.ai in a public reply. Privacy was the stated reason for offering the feature: Meta cited users who wanted AI context without public conversations.

Threads has 500 million monthly users as of June. For most of them, the DM option is a meaningful privacy difference - forwarding a post to Meta AI for context gives no public signal, no algorithmic weight, and nothing visible on the profile. Someone seeing a viral post with contested claims can get sourcing and background from Meta AI without engaging publicly. For a platform where public replies carry algorithmic weight, that distinction matters more than it sounds.

Meta AI Threads Public Feed Is Still Limited to Five Countries

Meta AI Threads' public feed is a separate rollout. Only five countries have it. Testing started in May 2026 in Argentina, Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, where Meta AI posts its own content and users can tag it with @meta.ai. Those users cannot block the account outright - the only options are clicking "not interested" or muting any Meta AI replies.

Threads has been adding features at pace this year, including Co-Hosts and translation support for Live Chats in April, but no equivalent control over Meta AI's public activity has come with any update. Meta's AI push has moved slower than Zuckerberg planned. After cutting 8,000 jobs to accelerate development, Zuckerberg acknowledged the original timeline slipped. Running Meta AI across all four major platforms in a single year is one of the cleaner results of that effort, even if the agent-level ambitions are still unfinished.

Meta AI Threads DMs complete the consumer rollout. Four down. No timeline exists for expanding the public feed beyond its current five countries. Meta AI runs on Muse Spark 1.1, which Meta opened to external developers last month through its first public API - the same model now powering every Meta DM is also accessible to developers building on top of it.