Meta has stepped up its artificial intelligence push with the launch of a new coding agent and an updated AI model, as the social media giant looks to close the gap with rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company unveiled Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code on Wednesday, with the latter serving as a coding harness that runs the updated model. Muse Spark 1.2 is a coding-focused update to the Muse Spark model Meta introduced last month.
The latest tools put Meta further into the increasingly competitive AI coding market, where agents are being used to automate parts of software development and reduce development time. Meta is positioning Muse Spark 1.2 against models including Anthropic’s Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Terra, Gemini 3.6 Flash and Grok 4.5.
The launch comes as Meta continues rebuilding its AI efforts after its Llama models struggled to impress developers last year. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has since stepped up recruitment, including the US$14.3 billion acquihire of Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wang, who now serves as Meta’s chief AI officer.
Meta has also expanded its AI model line-up with Muse Image for image generation and a preview of Muse Video, alongside successive versions of Muse Spark.
That expansion, however, comes with a hefty price tag. Meta has raised the lower end of its capital expenditure forecast to US$134 billion from US$124 billion previously, while keeping the upper end at US$145 billion, as it invests heavily in AI models and the data centres needed to run them.
The spending has also weighed on Meta’s shares. The stock was flat in after-hours trading after the latest AI launches and has fallen more than 20% over the past 12 months.
That compares with a roughly 7% decline for Microsoft, while Amazon has gained about 27% and Alphabet has risen more than 80% over the same period.
