Meta debuts Muse Spark 1.3 as personal agent work continues

State of play: Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang told Axios the update helps pave the way for upcoming products, such as personal agents.

• "It's very competitive with frontier models," Wang said in an interview.
• "A lot of the usability improvements that we've made will be really helpful for things that Mark [Zuckerberg] has talked about on earnings calls, like personal agents that can work 24/7 on your behalf and help you achieve your goals."

The big picture: Meta's release comes amid a flurry of model updates from across the industry.

• Google on Wednesday debuted Gemini 3.8 Flash, as well as a version geared toward cybersecurity work. Google's new model showed some impressive performance on certain coding benchmarks and a larger update, Gemini 4, remains in training.
• Anthropic released updates to its Fable and Mythos models designed to cut costs and reduce the frequency of refusals of user requests for safety issues.
• OpenAI, meanwhile, said Tuesday it will soon release its Astra model, though it will limit its most powerful cybersecurity capabilities to a smaller group of testers.

Zoom in: Muse Spark 1.3 is priced the same as its predecessor, which Wang characterized as "aggressive."

• He also noted strong uptake for Meta's "contributor tier" option that dramatically lowers the cost of its coding product if developers allow Meta to use their work to improve its models.
• Wang said a "meaningful double digit" percentage of coders are choosing that option.

Between the lines: With more powerful models, there is also more attention on safety, Wang said.

• "We have more powerful models that are in development," he said. "So this is one of the most important topics internally right now."
• While much of the attention around model misbehavior has focused on OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta also had an incident where a model in testing breached another company after being given internet access by a contractor.

Yes, but: Unlike other leading labs, Wang says Meta didn't find it necessary to pause any work to address safety concerns.

• "We have not yet had to pause, but we have meaningfully increased our own investments into safety and alignment to ensure we we don't hit any of the guardrails," Wang said.

Muse Spark 1.3 will roll out today in Muse Code and Meta's API.

• The company said the "max reasoning" version is coming soon after the additional safety testing.

What we're watching: Whether Meta will continue to close the gap with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google and how its model improvements — especially in agentic work — show up in Meta's products.