Mark Zuckerberg broke a three-year silence on X (Twitter) on Thursday to unveil Muse Spark 1.1 and the Meta Model API, the company’s first paid platform for outside developers. The launch pushes Meta against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
The model competes on cost, and Meta is betting a lower price will win developers and pressure rivals’ margins. Yet META stock barely moved, rising only 2% after the news.
Muse Spark 1.1 is what the industry calls an agentic model. It is built to act, not just answer questions. It can plan a task, use software and tools, and operate a computer across desktop, mobile, and browser.
We’re excited to introduce Muse Spark 1.1, a significant upgrade from the first Muse Spark model we released earlier this year.Along with this release, we are launching a public preview of the new Meta Model API where developers can access Muse Spark 1.1.The model is also… pic.twitter.com/bpwPlxwWDq
— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) July 9, 2026
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The model also handles long, multi-step work. It holds up to one million tokens in memory, close to a small book of text, and can split jobs among helper agents that run at the same time.
Meta says it writes and fixes code well, and it reads images and video, not only text. Allegedly, the model handles long-running, multimodal tasks. Anyone can try it now in “Thinking” mode in the Meta AI app and on meta.ai.
“Muse Spark 1.1 is strongest at agentic performance, tool use, and computer use,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Price is Meta’s pitch. It set the listed rates at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. That undercuts Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5, which lists $3 and $15, and lands near its cheapest model, Claude Haiku 4.5.
Zuckerberg cast the move as a direct hit on rivals’ margins.
“The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins. We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost,” Bloomberg reported, citing Zuckerberg.
Meta is not alone. Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI, working with the coding startup Cursor, shipped Grok 4.5 to the public the same day.
It is another low-cost agentic model, priced at $2 per million input tokens, and Meta’s $1.25 rate undercuts even that. Musk noticed the overlap, replying “Jinx” to coverage of the twin launches and then “Same time.”
Jinx
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2026
The Meta Model API, introduced Thursday, lets outside developers plug Muse Spark 1.1 into their own apps for the first time. New sign-ups get $20 in free credits before billing begins.
That is a sharp turn from Meta’s open-weight Llama models, which it gave away free to build market share. Muse Spark 1.1 upgrades a reasoning model Meta launched in April through its Superintelligence Labs, the unit built after last year’s $14.3 billion Scale AI deal that brought in AI chief Alexandr Wang.
Coding platforms Replit and Cline are early partners.
Shares swung nearly 2% during Thursday’s session, trading roughly flat after giving back an early rally toward $607. As of this writing, META stock traded for $614.61, a modest performance likely attributed to investors hearing big AI promises before and staying fixed on the bill.
Meta raised its 2026 capital budget to as much as $145 billion in April, nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025. The stock fell more than 6% after that guidance.
The strain is not new. Meta has cut about 8,000 jobs this year to fund the AI push, and some large investors have rotated into Google.
Selling model access gives Meta a revenue line beyond advertising, tied to the AI data centers it is racing to fill. For now it is a small one.
The reaction shows Wall Street is looking past benchmarks. The real test is whether developers pick Meta’s lower prices over rival tools in the coming weeks.