Zuckerberg Pledges ‘Aggressive’ Pricing With Meta’s First Pay-to-Use AI

In a crowded market for AI tools, Mark Zuckerberg wants to win on price.

Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a version of its most advanced artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark 1.1, that includes a new paid tier for developers, marking the first time Meta has charged businesses for access to its models and providing a new revenue stream. It’ll be among the most affordable options on the market, Zuckerberg said in an interview ahead of the release.

“Since this is not an open source model, this is I think the first time that we’re doing a real serious API,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the application programming interface used to access Meta’s AI. “And the pricing is going to be very aggressive and attractive.”

The new model’s standout improvement is in its agentic capabilities, the Meta chief executive officer said. Agents are the big theme of AI this year, with the label applied to systems that can complete multistep tasks on behalf of a user. Zuckerberg described Muse Spark 1.1 as having “state-of-the-art or very close to it” agentic reasoning and tool use. The model is also greatly improved when it comes to coding and Meta employees are using it internally to build products and features for various apps, he added.

Meta will also introduce a new Meta Model API system, which will be used to collect fees from developers. Its API pricing is roughly 25% of the cost advertised by other top models from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. Developers will be able to use Meta’s model for free, but only up to a point; they’ll be required to pay for access after reaching a certain token threshold, Zuckerberg said.

“The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins,” Zuckerberg said, underscoring that his strategy is to get Meta’s technology in front of as many people as possible. “We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost.”

Zuckerberg, 42, is spending aggressively to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc. in a race to achieve what he calls superintelligence, or AI that can perform tasks better than humans. Meta has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building the infrastructure necessary to develop superintelligence, including data centers and expensive AI chips. The company announced a new $10 billion data center investment in Canada as well as a new image-generation model just this week.

Despite that investment, Meta’s models have not historically tested at the same level as those from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. But Muse Spark 1.1 is more competitive, Zuckerberg said, and tested better than Google’s Gemini model in several categories related to agents, coding and multimodal capabilities.

“That is a pretty interesting milestone because I think this may be the first time, at least that I can remember, that Meta’s models are better than all of the Google models,” he said.

‘Better than we expected’

Zuckerberg’s commitment to the AI race has led to a series of extreme shifts in strategy and resources over the past year. Following a disappointing model launch in the spring of 2025, Zuckerberg became personally involved in rebuilding Meta’s AI lab, which included hiring Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang to lead the new unit, and eventually, significant layoffs and several internal reorganizations.

Once fully committed to building open source AI models that are available for free to outside developers, Meta has also pivoted toward prioritizing closed models that it can charge for — like Muse Spark 1.1 — which required essentially rebuilding the technologies from scratch.

Zuckerberg said he’s pleased with how the lab is progressing.

“We’re generally doing better than we expected,” Zuckerberg said. He acknowledged that Meta is still trailing some of the larger AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, but said that the company has another new model coming, codenamed Watermelon, that he believes can help Meta “push this maximum frontier of intelligence.” He declined to share details on Watermelon’s release timeline, saying that the focus is on quality.

Investing in a frontier model — or AI technology that moves the industry forward with new capabilities and features — is an expensive endeavor. But Zuckerberg believes it’s worth the investment from Meta given his mission: To build personal agents that everyone in the world can use.

Zuckerberg said that if Meta relies on other models to deliver this goal, there is no guarantee they will be built with the personal assistant use case in mind.

Read more: Inside Meta’s Pivot From Open Source to Money-Making AI Model

“If you really want to build the best experiences for people, you have to be able to shape the underlying technology,” the Meta CEO said. Controlling the technology is going to let Meta “deliver exactly what we think is going to be the best experience.”

Zuckerberg is not convinced that the technology will ultimately become a commodity — that is, that all of the various AI models will essentially do the same thing and be more or less indiscernible from one another. He pointed to Mythos, the latest model from Anthropic, which raised national security concerns in the US, as an example of how companies are already gatekeeping aspects of the technology instead of sharing it widely.

“The capabilities are not actually getting diffused or made broadly available to everyone,” Zuckerberg said. “Anthropic is sort of keeping a model for themselves and releasing a kind of simpler version of a model. And there are all these reasons for why they may or may not be doing it. But that at least does not suggest to me that the world is either heading in, or is guaranteed to head in, a direction where this ends up being something that is widely available.”

AI business

Meta has projected record capital expenditures for 2026, is spending billions on AI talent to build out its Meta Superintelligence Labs, and has pledged hundreds of billions more to infrastructure projects. Critics have questioned whether the pivot has paid off.

After Meta reported earnings in April, shares fell nearly 9%, despite strong revenue and profit, due to concerns that the company didn’t have a business plan in place to recoup its aggressive investment in artificial intelligence.

Meta has taken steps to alleviate those concerns in recent months. It announced plans for a consumer chatbot subscription and is also planning to sell an AI agent to businesses. It’s now also selling access to its top-line AI model, and the company is making plans for a cloud business that may involve selling its computing power and AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported.

Read more: Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power

Zuckerberg said Meta is trying to be thoughtful with pricing for its new developer API to maximize the technology’s reach and ensure that AI tools are widely distributed.

“Someone needs to go build the models and make sure that you’re going to have very high-quality intelligence that is accessible to everyone,” Zuckerberg said. Muse Spark 1.1 will power the Meta AI chatbot, which is free, he pointed out.