Meta Targets Anthropic and OpenAI With Discounted Muse Code AI Tool

Meta Platforms Inc. has released an early beta of Muse Code, entering the automated software engineering market with aggressive token pricing designed to challenge established rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.

The terminal-based coding agent, driven by Meta’s new Muse Spark 1.2 model, allows engineers to automate end-to-end software development, debug complex codebases, and coordinate multi-agent task workflows through plain-text commands. The move brings Meta into direct competition with developer tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

Meta is positioning pricing strategy as its primary leverage against market leaders. Standard pay-as-you-go access costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. However, Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang told CNBC that Meta will also offer a lower-cost contributor tier, which charges $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens in exchange for developer feedback to refine the agent, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The discounted contributor rates undercut mainstream competitive benchmarks, including Anthropic’s Sonnet 5 model, which charges $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Corporate engineering departments confronting escalating cloud computing costs have increasingly gravitated toward budget-friendly model providers, mirroring the recent migration toward lower-cost open-weights models such as DeepSeek.

During product demonstrations, Meta highlighted Muse Code generating working web applications directly from MP4 video files, alongside software projects including a photon sphere simulation and a custom game clone modeled on Plants vs. Zombies. The release marks Meta’s latest expansion into developer infrastructure as AI providers rush to integrate autonomous workflows into commercial software engineering.