Meta Charges for a Frontier Model for the First Time: Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/$4.25

TechCrunch·high signal

Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9 — a multimodal reasoning model built for tool use, computer use, and multi-agent orchestration with a 1M-token context — priced at $1.25 per 1M input and $4.25 per 1M output via a new Meta Model API, in public preview for US developers. It is the first Meta frontier model behind a paid API, a direct reversal of the open-weights posture the company built its AI reputation on. Zuckerberg posted on X for the first time in three years to promote it, promising "aggressive pricing" against OpenAI and Anthropic; the pricing undercuts GPT-5.6 Terra on both sides of the meter.