Meta has opened the AI price war on a new front. On Thursday, according to Reuters, the company released long-awaited developer access to its Muse Spark AI model alongside an upgraded version, Muse Spark 1.1 — pitting it directly against the business models of rival AI firms.
The key detail is the price. Muse Spark 1.1 is Meta's first pay-to-use, commercial AI model, and The Tech Portal describes it as the first commercial version of Meta's flagship AI system. According to The Decoder, Meta is charging $4.25 per million output tokens — a rate it says undercuts even the "dirt-cheap" Grok 4.5, which The Decoder notes was released just a day earlier. That figure, The Decoder reports, is a fraction of what Anthropic or OpenAI ask.
Moomoo frames the move in similar terms, reporting that Meta's paid large language model outperforms Google's offering while costing just one-quarter the price of Anthropic's.
The competitive pressure lands hardest on companies that sell AI and little else. As The Decoder puts it, for pure-play AI labs "burning through billions," the pressure just got worse. Meta, by contrast, funds its AI work from a large advertising business, giving it room to price aggressively.
Why it matters: if a deep-pocketed giant like Meta keeps driving the cost of AI toward zero, standalone labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic may find it far harder to charge enough to cover their enormous spending — a squeeze that could reshape who ultimately profits from the AI boom.