Meta launches Muse Wonder, catching OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier

Meta announced the launch of a new AI model family, Muse Wonder , which is already rolling out to developers.

Independent benchmarks indicate that Muse Wonder places Meta firmly at the AI frontier for the first time.

The release comes just six weeks after the launch of Muse Spark 1.3, the latest version of a model family that debuted in April .

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta invested heavily in AI recruiting and infrastructure after falling behind rival tech companies, culminating in Meta paying $14.3 billion for Scale AI and naming its wunderkind CEO, Alexandr Wang, then 28, Meta's new Chief AI officer.

Those efforts appear to be paying dividends.

Artificial Analysis , an independent AI benchmarking organization, showed Muse Wonder leapfrogging powerful models like GPT-Astra from OpenAI, Fable 5 from Anthropic, and the newly released Gemini 4 from Google.

On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index leaderboard , which uses a weighted composite score to rank AI models, Muse Wonder Full is now second only to Claude Opus 5.5 Max, and tied with Claude Sonnet 5.5 Max.

This Tweet is currently unavailable.

It might be loading or has been removed.

The results suggest that Meta has caught up to the AI frontier, after previously being more of an afterthought in the AI market.

That started to change recently with the launch of the hugely popular AI agent Muse , which quickly surpassed 5 million app downloads .

In its Muse Wonder announcement blog post , Meta said that the new model family "will soon power experiences in Muse," though it will only be available to paid subscribers.

Introducing Muse Wonder, designed for agentic AI In the blog post introducing Muse Wonder, Meta emphasized that the model was designed for agentic workflows as well as user safety. (The company said a full report about its safety evaluations "will be available soon.") Wang said the model family was developed under the codename "watermelon," according to CNBC .

"Meta is introducing Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, our most capable models to date, built to deliver state-of-the-art performance on personal and professional agentic tasks — from navigating an insurance claim to making sense of a lease to building a working app," reads Meta's announcement.