Meta Launches Muse Spark Model to Challenge Claude

Meta is pushing generative AI beyond chatbots toward agents capable of planning, calling tools and completing multi-step tasks. Muse Spark 1.3 is positioned as the company’s most capable model, with improvements in coding, long-running multitasking and proactive clarification. Its planned integration into core products including Instagram also makes the release an important part of Meta’s effort to bring agentic AI to its consumer platforms.

Meta recently released Muse Spark 1.3 alongside Muse Glimmer, an open-source model with roughly 30 billion parameters designed for agentic workloads on personal computers. The company says Spark 1.3 uses about 20% fewer tool calls and 25% fewer tokens than Muse Spark 1.2 on agentic coding tasks. Glimmer is intended to run multi-step reasoning and automated workflows locally, offering developers a lighter alternative to Meta’s flagship model.

Meta Superintelligence Labs introduced the Muse Spark family in April as a multimodal reasoning system designed for complex scientific and software tasks. Muse Spark 1.2 extends that push as leading AI developers increasingly compete not only on headline accuracy, but also on the cost and speed of deploying models. Its tool-free Olympiad tests are significant because they seek to isolate the model’s underlying reasoning rather than gains from web search, coding or calculators.

Meta released Muse Spark 1.2 on Aug. 5 and on Aug. 7 said it achieved gold-medal-level results across several STEM Olympiads without external tools. Vals AI scored the model at 71.9 on the Vals Index, up 3.5 points from Muse Spark 1.1, placing it in the top five at a cost of $0.69 per test. It also led Finance Agent v2 with 59.4%, ahead of Gemini 3.6 Flash at 58.1%, while completing the Index run in 629.7 seconds.

Meta Platforms is expanding its generative-AI push into software development, taking aim at terminal-based coding tools led by Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. Meta Superintelligence Labs introduced the Muse Spark model family on April 8 and opened a paid developer API on July 9. Muse Code marks a broader effort to turn Meta’s AI research into commercial tools for engineers handling complex, repository-scale work.

Meta AI released Muse Code in beta on Aug. 5, powered by the new Muse Spark 1.2 model and available on macOS and Linux. The agent can plan changes, write code, run tests and verify results, while persistent asynchronous background agents continue working across long sessions. Standard API pricing is $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. Meta said one demonstration ran for up to 24 hours and made more than 1,000 tool calls.

Meta built its open-source AI profile with the Llama series, but is now introducing Muse Spark from Meta Superintelligence Labs, a multimodal model designed to process text and images. The model will be integrated into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and smart glasses, signaling a shift toward a product-first strategy and commercial applications.

Muse Spark was formally unveiled after three delays. As of July 19, 2026, its API was available only to invited developers in preview and the model had not been open-sourced. Meta has not yet disclosed API pricing, model parameters or the amount invested, but has confirmed that Muse Spark will strengthen Meta AI’s reasoning capabilities and extend into personal-assistant services for areas including health and shopping.