By Harshita Mary Varghese and Katie Paul
July 9 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms on Thursday released long-awaited developer access to its Muse Spark AI alongside an upgraded version, pitting it directly against the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI in charging for use of its AI model.
The social media giant touted Muse Spark 1.1 as its most capable model for real-world coding and agentic tasks, part of a broader mission the company is pitching of delivering “personal superintelligence.”
Meta said the upgraded model can write and debug code, use software and external tools, understand text, images and video, and carry out complex multi-step tasks with less human intervention.
In April, Meta debuted Muse Spark, the first text and reasoning AI model from the superintelligence team it assembled last year to close the gap with rivals in the heated competition for AI supremacy.
Meta was testing the Application Programming Interface with partners in a private preview during its launch. The API is a key element for AI systems, acting like a digital bridge for developers that allows them to use the model’s capabilities in their own software systems.
“If Muse Spark 1.1 is genuinely competitive with Claude and Codex on coding, then Meta may finally have a much clearer monetization bridge from AI models to paid developer tools,” said Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities.
Developers in the United States can now access Muse Spark in public preview on Meta Model API, letting them test prompts, compare outputs and prototype integrations.
Those who sign up for the API receive $20 in free credits to test the model before switching to pay-as-you-go pricing.
“Our focus is on delivering strong agentic and multimodal models at very low cost,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on X.
The access is priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, above OpenAI’s entry-level GPT‑5 mini and Anthropic’s low-cost Claude Haiku 4.5, but below Anthropic’s higher-end Claude Sonnet 4.6 model.
The new model is now available in Thinking mode in the Meta AI app and on the website. It is also expected to replace existing Llama models powering chatbots on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Meta’s collection of smart glasses.
The release follows a company announcement on Tuesday expanding generative AI tools across its apps by rolling out Muse Image, its first image-generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru and Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Pooja Desai)
