Meta launched Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9, pricing its first paid AI model below Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The move puts Meta in the coding and agentic AI market, dominated by its rivals. The launch marks a shift from Meta’s open-source Llama strategy, with AI chief Alexandr Wang saying the pricing is designed to compete with market leaders.
Muse Spark Pricing
Meta priced Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with new accounts receiving $20 in free credits. Muse Spark 1.1 undercuts major AI rivals on price, with its input rate 37% below Sonnet 5’s introductory $2 and 75% below Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. The output side shows an even wider gap, with Meta’s $4.25 rate 58% below Sonnet 5’s introductory $10, 83% below Opus 4.8’s $25, and 86% below GPT-5.5’s $30.
Market Impact
The pricing gap could matter most for heavy, high-volume workloads, with developers paying less than a third of what GPT-5.5 charges on output alone. According to Alexandr Wang, the pricing is “very aggressive and attractive”. Meta detailed the specifics in its paid API pivot, marking the company’s first charge for AI model access after years of free Llama releases. Muse Spark 1.1 reportedly rivals GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 on agentic benchmarks, although access remains limited to US developers on a waitlist. Whether Muse Spark can match Claude and ChatGPT on real-world coding tasks remains unproven, but cheaper access could pull developers toward Meta’s model over time.
Based on reporting from crypto.news.
