❯ Meta debuts first coding agent Muse Code, with output priced at $4.25 per million tokens

PRICING HOOKMeta has introduced its first coding agent, Muse Code, now in beta — installable in a terminal with one command, able to plan changes, write code, and verify results on its own. Powering it is the same-day Muse Spark 1.2 release, with the two jointly trained. Pricing is usage-based: $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with cached input as low as $0.15. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, told CNBC that the low entry price is the hook this time.

RELEASE CADENCEMuse Spark 1.2 posts 54 points on Artificial Analysis’s intelligence index — 3 above July’s 1.1 release and 11 above the April original, the third launch in four months, one of the densest release cadences among US labs and tied with SpaceXAI for third by score. Meta reports Muse Code at 59% on DeepSWE 1.1, ahead of Grok Build 4.5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash — a number that is currently vendor-reported only. Researcher teortaxes flags a more telling detail: Muse Spark’s input, output, and cache-hit prices are all below DeepSeek V4-Flash — undercut even the column where Chinese models have long been strongest. Meta also introduced a “contributor tier” priced more than ten times below pay-as-you-go, conditional on developers agreeing to have their session data used to improve the model.

DATA FOR SHARETrading model gross margin for call data is the only explanation that makes sense of this pricing. Enterprise buyers see more than the unit price: the contributor tier, ten times cheaper, routes codebases, error reports, and fix trajectories to Meta — precisely the training material coding models lack the most. First in the line of fire are Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s coding product lines, whose pricing assumptions rest on coding as a high-value scenario that can be sold at a premium. For engineering leads, the trade-off to put on the table and settle is whether the call fees saved outweigh the compliance cost of handing internal code over.

▪ SIGNALThe coding-model price war is on — the first shot lands on competitors’ margins, and the ammunition is data.