Meta will open source its most powerful AI model, allowing anyone to download and use it freely. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement Monday in an Instagram video, saying the company would release the weights for its latest model, Muse Spark 1.2. Weights are the calculations and rules that determine how an AI system works and behaves.
Zuckerberg also said Meta will release a new family of open-source models called Muse Glimmer, built to run directly on laptops rather than requiring cloud-based data centers. The announcement sent Meta shares up 2.1% in premarket trading Monday. The stock is still down roughly 10% for the year as investors have kept a close watch on the company's spending plans and its ability to compete with leading AI labs.
According to CNBC, Meta formed the Meta Superintelligence Labs last year and has forecast capital expenditure of up to $145 billion this year. Zuckerberg used Monday's announcement to signal that the investment is producing results.
The move puts Meta in direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have primarily built closed AI models that the public cannot access or modify. Chinese companies including Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot have taken a different path, aggressively releasing open-weight models that have competed with U.S. technology in several areas.
Zuckerberg addressed this competitive dynamic directly in a 6,500-word essay on AI published Monday. He framed Meta's release as part of a broader effort to ensure American open-source models lead the world rather than Chinese ones.
"Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data. US policy must reduce this additional friction if we want American open source models to lead over time," Zuckerberg wrote.
He also pushed back against proposals to restrict access to foreign open-source models.
"I do not believe restricting access to foreign open source models is an effective solution. Our goal should be for American open source models to be the best globally. This requires removing the hurdles that make it harder for American open source models to compete," he wrote.
Zuckerberg warned that keeping AI development inside closed systems could push developers toward Chinese alternatives.
"If Western tech giants only build walled gardens, developers and enterprise builders will naturally pivot to Chinese open-weight models," he wrote.
Industry analysts said Meta's positioning makes strategic sense. Neil Shah, co-founder at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC that demand for non-Chinese open models is strong.
"Most of its competitors in USA are proprietary and there is an insatiable demand for non-Chinese open models and weights and Meta can fill in this void well," Shah said.
Shah also pointed to Muse Glimmer's laptop design as a meaningful advantage over rivals. Most AI processing today happens in cloud-based data centers, which carry significant costs.
"Bringing small, agentic models like Muse Glimmer directly onto PC and mobile hardware bypasses cloud compute costs to outcompete Google, Microsoft and others on the end-user's device," Shah said.
Zuckerberg used the essay to call on Washington to rethink policy in several areas related to AI development, including distillation and data use rules that he said put American labs at a disadvantage compared to foreign competitors.
