Meta debuts Muse Code to take on Anthropic and OpenAI

Meta is rolling out its first coding agent called Muse Code as the company tries to challenge leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI.

Muse Code is the latest major release from AI chief Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs and oversees foundation model development. Wang joined in June of last year as the centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to revamp his company’s flailing artificial intelligence strategy.

The new tool, like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex assistants, makes it easier for people to build apps within a single user interface while managing fleets of AI-powered digital agents that can help underpin the software development process.

“Muse Code is a terminal coding agent, like many of the other coding agents on the market,” Wang said. “So you can install it with one command and then use it to take on complete software engineering tasks across a wide variety of use cases, planning changes, writing code, validating the results.”

Meta’s coding agent, available in a so-called beta, or preview version, works alongside Meta’s latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.2. Similar to the MuseSpark 1.1 model that Meta released in July, the newest version specializes in coding.

The latest Muse Spark model differs from the prior version, however, because it was developed and trained alongside Muse Code, which Wang said improves the overall coding performance.

Developers can access Muse Code via pay-as-you-go option that Wang said contains similar API pricing as the Muse Spark 1.1 release, in which the company charges $1.25 per million tokens in input and $4.25 per million tokens of output.

Wang added that Muse Code also has “a contributor tier that gets you in at a significantly lower cost,” which he characterizes as being “more than 10 times cheaper than than even the pay-as-you-go tier.”

“And as part of that, you opt-in to help improve the model in an industry standard way in-line with all the other coding agents,” Wang said.

Meta is differentiating its new AI coding tool and Muse Spark family of models by price and not bleeding-edge capabilities when compared to the popular Claude Code and Codex services and related technologies from Anthropic and OpenAI, Wang explained.

Wang said Meta is “also starting to accept requests for zero-data retention,” in which the company would not retain developer data to improve models, and other uses. He said it represents “a big enterprise feature that is important for folks.”

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