Meta Starts Charging for Its Own Model With Muse Spark 1.1 and a New API

Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9 and opened a public preview of the Meta Model application programming interface (API), the first time the company has charged developers to use its own model rather than releasing open weights. The announcement positions the model for agentic and coding work, with a one-million-token context window, multimodal input across images, video, and documents, built-in search with citations, structured output, and parallel tool calling.

The commercial framing matters as much as the specifications. The API supports the OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses formats and the Anthropic Messages format, so redirecting an existing agent is a base-URL and key change rather than a rewrite, per Meta's developer materials. Pricing is $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with $20 in starter credits, placing it below the top closed frontier tiers, as TechCrunch noted.

For a company that built its AI standing on downloadable Llama weights, a paid, closed API is a strategic pivot toward the coding and agent market that Anthropic and OpenAI already contest. Meta has not published independent third-party coding benchmarks alongside the release, so the "top-tier coding" claim rests on vendor framing until outside evaluations appear.