Muse Wonder Puts Meta Back at the AI Frontier

WhenMark Zuckerbergrebooted his company’s artificial intelligence efforts last year, it seemed to be avery expensivegamble. Meta’s latest AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, seem to show that the bet is finally paying off by putting the company back at the frontier of AI development.

Muse Wonder Full boasts frontier capabilities, Meta says, meaning that it is among the most capable AI models in the world. “Together, they mark the next step on our scaling ladder and a major leap toward personal superintelligence,” the company said ina blog posttoday.

The Muse Wonder models will be available though an API and through Muse Code, a tool for writing software with AI. Meta says the best version of the model will power features across its platforms, including itsMuse personal agent.

Zuckerberg overhauled his company’s AI research last year bysinking billionsinto the recently formed Meta Superintelligence Labs, and hiring the former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead it. This efforthas sometimes been rocky, with some researchers not sticking around for long.

Meta was once a trailblazer in AI. ItsLlama series of modelswere the first frontier open-weight offerings from a big lab. Llama, which could be downloaded and run on one’s own hardware, was widely adopted by researchers and startups.

But the company fell behind after delivering several disappointing versions of the model, and as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google rapidly introduced more capable models.

Meta announced the first model from its new lab,Muse Spark, in April of this year. The company has also released a small open weight model calledMuse Glimmer, and says it plans to release larger open-weight models in the future. It did not disclose details of how new Muse Wonder models were built or trained.

Muse Wonder was built to compete with the very best, however. Meta says the largest version of the new model outperforms Anthropic’s second-best model, Claude Fable 5.1, and ranks just below its best, Claude Opus 5.5, on theArtificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a widely used aggregated score of model capabilities.

Meta says the model outperforms OpenAI’s best model, GPT-6 Astra, and both Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 on some specialized benchmarks, including ones that measure a model’s ability to work with legal documents and to build software. Benchmarks are not always a reliable measure of real-world performance, but this is still a significant step forward for Meta’s models.

Muse Wonder also includes two novel features designed to help make agents more effective and less inclined to misbehave. The new features, called Active Memory and Active Focus, are designed to keep the model locked into a stated goal, and prevent it from becoming confused. This can be a challenge when AI performs complex research or builds a large software project, for example, and can lead to expensive mistakes or compounded errors.

Meta says it has put significant effort into training Muse Wonder to refuse to generate dangerous outputs, such as recipes for building bioweapons or help with hacking. It says the company scores well on several benchmarks designed to measure how resilient models are to those prompts.

A series of recent incidents involvingrogue AI agentsfrom Anthropic, OpenAI, and others, also shows how easily powerful AI models can stray when given open-ended commands. Meta did not disclose whether it has seen agents powered by Muse Wonder misbehave in testing or what it has done to mitigate this issue specifically.

Zuckerberg said ina post on Xlast month that the company had delayed the release of its Muse models to work on safety. Meta alsorevealed a frameworkdesigned to ensure that it scales its models’ capabilities safely in a blog post earlier this month.

Muse Wonder may add more fuel to an already furious race to develop more capable AI, however. It certainly suggests that Meta is once again competitive in the increasingly high-stakes AI race.

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is a senior writer for WIRED, covering artificial intelligence. He writes the

, a weekly dispatch from beyond the cutting edge of AI—

. He was previously a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, where he wrote about fundamental advances in AI and China’s AI ...

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