Mark Zuckerberg announced on social media Wednesday that Meta is launching Muse Code, its first AI programming agent, in a direct challenge to OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude Code. The tool is in beta and is powered by Muse Spark 1.2, the latest base model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Meta's published benchmarks position Muse Code as a value-and-reliability play rather than a capability leader. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Muse Code with Muse Spark 1.2 scored 82.9% — ahead of Codex on GPT-5.6 Terra (81.8%) and Grok Build (81.6%), but behind Claude Code on Opus 5 (86.7%). Meta's pitch is low price plus 'crash recovery' capabilities instead of top benchmark scores.

The move deepens Meta's expansion into the developer layer — its first standalone coding application — and opens a new monetization lane as it burns heavily on AI infrastructure. It lands a week after Muse topped the iPhone App Store, with Meta Connect framing Muse as a personal agent that now spans phone, smart glasses, and the developer desktop.