By Nate Wolf

Meta Platforms unveiled a new pair of artificial-intelligence models on Monday as the company's once-scattershot AI strategy continues to take shape.

Meta says the two models, dubbed Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, rival top offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic on public benchmarks. The release "brings us to the frontier," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post, referring to the leading edge of AI capabilities.

Muse Wonder will help power Meta's popular new Muse personal agent soon, the company said. It is also available through Meta's API platform and the Muse Code coding agent.

Meta shares surged 3.4% on Monday, though they were already climbing ahead of Zuckerberg's afternoon announcement. The stock has jumped 13% this year and 31% since the start of September.

Just a few months ago, Wall Street was questioning how Meta would justify its massive AI investments. The company expects capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion in 2026 alone.

The Muse agent offered an answer to that question in September. A true "frontier" model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, the pricey AI division launched last year, could keep the momentum going.

"We think growing evidence that MSL investments are translating into stronger model performance and product innovation could continue support sentiment & multiple expansion," Justin Post, an analyst at BofA Securities, wrote in a research note last month.

Meta appears to be positioning Muse Wonder as a solution for detailed, long-running tasks. The model uses what Meta calls "active memory" to carry context across conversations and tasks. It also has "active focus," meaning, according to Meta, it will work persistently on challenging tasks that require sustained effort.

Muse Wonder, the less powerful of the two models released Monday, costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens -- the standard measure of an AI query's size. That is the same cost as Anthropic's leading model, Claude Opus 5.5, and 40% of the cost of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, according to model evaluator Artificial Analysis.

Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com

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October 12, 2026 16:27 ET (20:27 GMT)