Meta goes closed with Muse Spark 1.1, priced up to 83% below Claude

Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 marks a genuine strategic reversal: the company that built its reputation on open-weight Llama is now selling model access through a metered proprietary API for the first time, undercutting Claude by up to 83% on price. Meta positions Spark 1.1 as its strongest model yet for agentic and coding tasks, and rounded out the release with Muse Image for creators and a teased forthcoming Muse video generator.

The move landed alongside Meta's Q2 report, which beat operating-profit estimates while narrowing annual capex guidance amid an aggressive data-center buildout — a signal Meta wants monetizable model revenue to help justify its infrastructure spend. The contradiction did not go unnoticed: Zuckerberg has continued to criticize OpenAI's and Anthropic's closed strategies even as Meta itself goes closed, which developers on r/LocalLLaMA and elsewhere called hypocritical.

The pivot intersects with a broader fight: 77 firms signed a letter accusing Anthropic of lobbying for open-weights restrictions, framing safety arguments as anti-competitive, while Chinese open models (DeepSeek V4, Alibaba's Qwen, GLM-5.2) pressure everyone on price and openness. Meta abandoning open weights at this exact moment reshapes the alliances in that war. What to watch: whether Meta keeps any open Llama track alive, how developers who built on open Llama respond, and whether the 83%-below-Claude pricing forces further cuts across the market.