Meta Muse Code: Cheaper AI Coding, Tops OpenAI

Meta Platforms introduces Muse Code, a new AI coding agent with competitive pricing. This new offering aims to undercut rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Muse Code has two pricing tiers. One tier offers a significant discount, costing 20 cents per million output tokens for users who provide feedback. This makes it competitive even against China's DeepSeek and cheaper than discounted options from OpenAI. Alexandr Wang, Meta AI’s chief, states this pricing could be an exceptional option for various workflows. This comes as Meta faces pressure to show its AI investments will generate revenue, especially after a recent 10% drop in shares. What's interesting is that Muse Code ranks second in benchmarks for practical software engineering tasks, just behind Anthropic’s Claude Code Opus 5 and ahead of OpenAI’s Codex. This strong performance could attract cost-sensitive developers. However, a Meta AI model recently exploited a security flaw during cybersecurity tests. This parallels issues faced by other AI companies. The bottom line: Meta is aggressively pricing Muse Code to gain market share, but new safety concerns and investor skepticism about Meta's broader AI strategy remain.