Muse Spark vs Claude Opus 5 comes down to one number: price. Meta’s coding model lists at $1.25 per million input tokens against Anthropic’s $5, and Muse Spark 1.1 currently sits at the top of Scale’s SWE-bench Pro public leaderboard with 61.5%. Claude Opus 5 is still the stronger generalist. For high-volume agentic coding, Meta is now the cheaper buy — by a wide margin.
What is Muse Spark, and why does it matter right now?
Muse Spark is Meta’s first closed, paid model line, aimed squarely at coding. Muse Spark 1.1 launched commercially on July 9, 2026 at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with $20 in free credits for new accounts, according to MarketScale.
Muse Spark 1.2 followed on August 5, 2026, with a 1M-token context window and the same headline rates.
A day later, Meta shipped Muse Code, an agent built on 1.2 that Forbes described as taking on “whole engineering jobs across large repositories, planning the change, writing the code, and checking the result.”
That is the competitive set: not a chatbot, an autonomous coding worker priced to undercut everyone.
The contributor tier is the actual product
Meta runs two price lists. The standard tier is $1.25 in / $4.25 out. The contributor tier is $0.10 in / $0.20 out — roughly 12x to 21x cheaper, per Forbes — and the price of entry is letting Meta train on your prompts and completions.
Cached input on the contributor tier drops to $0.01 per million tokens, according to MetaTalks.
This is Meta’s old playbook repriced for developers. The product is the data. The discount is what they will pay for it.
Which is better for coding, Muse Spark or Claude Opus 5?
On the hardest public agentic benchmark, Muse Spark leads. On broad capability, Claude wins. Scale’s SWE-bench Pro public leaderboard puts Muse Spark 1.1 first at 61.5%, ahead of gpt-5.4 (xHigh) at 59.1% and claude-opus-4-6 (thinking) at 51.9%. Meta’s own numbers tell a less flattering story elsewhere.
What SWE-bench Pro actually measures
SWE-bench Pro is Scale’s contamination-resistant successor to SWE-bench Verified. It spans 1,865 tasks across 41 repositories — 731 public instances from GPL-licensed code, 276 from private startup codebases, and 858 held out entirely.
The metric is resolve rate: the patch must fix the issue and not break existing tests.
The lead holds on the harder split. On the private dataset, Muse Spark 1.1 scores 51.5%, claude-opus-4-6 (thinking) 47.1%, and gpt-5.4 (xHigh) 43.4%.
Where Claude still wins
Meta’s own comparison is the tell. On Meta’s internal coding benchmark, Muse Spark 1.2 scores 70.6% against Claude Opus 5’s 79.4% — a gap Meta published itself.
On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Artificial Analysis ranks Claude Opus 5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) at 89.1%, behind GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) at 89.5% and ahead of Grok 4.6 (high) at 88.4%. Muse Spark 1.2’s published Terminal-Bench 2.1 figure is 82.9%.
Read that honestly: Meta is roughly 6 to 9 points behind the frontier on capability, and roughly 4x cheaper on input tokens. That is the entire trade.
Muse Spark vs Claude Opus 5: how much does each cost?
Claude Opus 5 lists at $5 per million input tokens and $25 output on Anthropic’s official pricing page. Muse Spark 1.2 lists at $1.25 and $4.25. That is 4x on input and 5.9x on output. On the contributor tier the gap widens to 50x and 125x.
Price and spec comparison
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context | SWE-bench Pro (public) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muse Spark 1.2 (standard) | $1.25 | $4.25 | 1M | 61.5% (v1.1) |
| Muse Spark (contributor) | $0.10 | $0.20 | 1M | 61.5% (v1.1) |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M (Opus-class) | Not yet listed |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M (beta) | 51.9% |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $5.00 | $30.00 | 1.05M | Not yet listed |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.00 | $12.00 | — | Not yet listed |
| GPT-5.4 | $2.50 | $15.00 | 1M+ | 59.1% (xHigh) |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | $2.00 (under 200k) | $12.00 (under 200k) | 1M | 46.1% |
Sources: vendor pricing pages and Scale’s public leaderboard, retrieved August 16, 2026.
Cost per resolved task
Benchmarks without a price tag are marketing. Here is the arithmetic that matters.
Assume one long-horizon agentic task burns 500,000 input tokens and 50,000 output tokens — realistic for the uncapped, 250-turn runs Scale used for its top entries. Divide the token cost by the model’s resolve rate to get the expected cost of one successfully resolved issue.
- Muse Spark, contributor tier — $0.06 per attempt ÷ 61.5% = $0.10 per resolved task
- Muse Spark 1.2, standard — $0.84 ÷ 61.5% = $1.37
- GPT-5.4 (xHigh) — $2.00 ÷ 59.1% = $3.38
- Gemini 3.1 Pro — $2.90 ÷ 46.1% = $6.29 (long-context rate: $4 / $18 above 200k tokens)
- Claude Opus 4.6 — $3.75 ÷ 51.9% = $7.23
Our calculation, using the listed rates above. At standard pricing Meta is 5.3x cheaper per resolved task than Opus 4.6. On the contributor tier it is 72x cheaper.
Run 10,000 agentic tasks a month and that is roughly $13,700 on Muse Spark standard versus $72,300 on Opus. The same workload on the contributor tier costs about $1,000 — and Meta keeps your codebase patterns.
Is Muse Spark worth it in 2026?
For high-volume, well-specified, repetitive engineering work: yes, decisively. For novel architecture, security-sensitive code, or anything where a wrong patch is expensive, no. The 6-to-9-point capability gap against Claude Opus 5 is small in a benchmark table and large in a production incident.
Which model should you pick?
| Use case | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk refactors, test generation, dependency bumps | Muse Spark 1.2 (standard) | 61.5% resolve rate at $1.37 per resolved task |
| Open-source or non-proprietary code | Muse Spark (contributor) | $0.10 per resolved task; data sharing costs you nothing |
| Proprietary IP, regulated or security-critical code | Claude Opus 5 | 79.4% on Meta’s own benchmark; no training-data trade |
| Terminal-heavy and sysadmin automation | GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude Opus 5 | 89.5% and 89.1% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 |
| Cost-capped agent fleets at scale | GPT-5.6 Luna or Terra | Luna lists at $0.20 / $1.20 per million tokens |
| Long-context repo analysis on a budget | Gemini 3.1 Pro (batch) | Batch mode halves rates to $1.00 / $6.00 |
One caution on the benchmark itself. Forbes noted Meta published its results “as images without methodology documentation,” which is a reason to weight Scale’s independent leaderboard over Meta’s slides.
What about GPT-5.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro?
OpenAI answered the price war directly. Its July 30, 2026 pricing post introduced Luna at $0.20 / $1.20 and Terra at $2.00 / $12.00 per million tokens, claiming Luna beats Fable 5 on Agents’ Last Exam at “an estimated cost per task nearly 99% lower.”
Google sits in the middle. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is $2.00 / $12.00 under 200k tokens, rising to $4.00 / $18.00 above it — and 46.1% on SWE-bench Pro public is the weakest score of the frontier group.
The pattern across all three: capability is converging, price is diverging. We saw the same dynamic when DeepSeek raised prices up to 1,100% overnight and when Qwen3.8-Max open weights forced a self-hosting math check.
Frequently asked questions
Is Muse Spark open weights?
No. Muse Spark is Meta’s first closed, commercial model line — a break from the open Llama releases. Access is API-only, and Muse Spark 1.1 launched behind a waitlist.
What is the catch with the $0.10 contributor tier?
Meta may use your prompts and responses to improve its products. If your prompts contain proprietary source code, customer data, or unreleased product logic, the discount is not a discount.
Does Muse Spark beat Claude Opus 5?
Not on capability. Meta’s own published comparison shows Muse Spark 1.2 at 70.6% versus Claude Opus 5 at 79.4%. Muse Spark 1.1 does lead Scale’s SWE-bench Pro public leaderboard at 61.5%, but Opus 5 is not yet listed there.
How big is Muse Spark’s context window?
Muse Spark 1.2 ships with 1M tokens. Claude Opus 4.6 also offers 1M in beta, and GPT-5.6 Sol lists 1,050,000 tokens with 128k maximum output.
Why does SWE-bench Pro matter more than SWE-bench Verified?
SWE-bench Pro was built to resist contamination, using GPL-copyleft and private proprietary repositories. Claude Opus 4.6 scores 80.3% on SWE-bench Verified but only 51.9% on SWE-bench Pro public — the gap is the point.
What is Muse Code?
Muse Code is Meta’s agent product, in beta, running on Muse Spark 1.2. It handles multi-step engineering jobs across large repositories rather than single-file completions.
Which model is cheapest per resolved coding task?
Muse Spark on the contributor tier, at roughly $0.10 by our calculation. On standard pricing it is about $1.37, still the cheapest of the frontier group.
The bottom line
Buy Muse Spark 1.2 for volume, keep Claude Opus 5 for judgment. If your agent workload is high-throughput and your code is not the crown jewels, Meta’s standard tier delivers roughly 5x more resolved tasks per dollar than Opus — and the contributor tier turns that into 72x if you are willing to be training data.
If a wrong patch costs more than a few hundred dollars to clean up, the 9-point capability gap to Opus 5 erases the savings on the first bad merge.
The financial read is simpler still. Meta is not selling inference; it is buying developer telemetry at a 90% discount, and OpenAI’s Luna tier says it will not let that go uncontested. Model prices are heading toward zero. The margin is moving to whoever owns the agent harness — which is exactly why Cognition’s valuation hit $40 billion, and why cost per coding point is now the only benchmark that pays.
Sources
- Scale — SWE-bench Pro Leaderboard (Public Dataset)
- Scale — SWE-bench Pro Leaderboard (Private Dataset)
- Anthropic — Claude Platform Pricing
- OpenAI — Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6
- Google — Gemini Developer API pricing
- Artificial Analysis — Terminal-Bench v2.1 leaderboard
- Forbes — Meta Launches Muse Code, Powered By Spark 1.2
- BenchLM — Muse Spark 1.2 benchmarks and pricing
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