Meta Platforms shares closed up 3.4% on Monday after the company launched Muse Wonder, its first top-tier frontier artificial intelligence model. The gain was enough to buck a broader tech selloff, with S&P 500 tech stocks falling 0.9% the same day, according to Bloomberg. Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the move was modest compared with the excitement that greeted Muse in September, when the stock surged 11% in a single session. Monday's 3.4% gain is roughly a third of that. Meta shares now trade near $742, about 5% below their September peak of $779.82, though they've still climbed over the past month.
What Meta says about Muse Wonder's performance
Meta claims its internal benchmarks place Muse Wonder and the larger Muse Wonder Full on par with top systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. Those comparisons come from Meta's own testing, according to TechCrunch, and haven't been independently verified.
The company has split the release into two tiers. Muse Wonder Full, the more capable model, is available only to subscribers of Muse Code, Meta's AI coding tool. Developers who want to buy access can get only the smaller Muse Wonder, priced at $4 per million input tokens. That price sits close to Anthropic's Opus 5.5, which suggests Meta is treating this as a subscription play rather than a land grab for developer market share.
Wonder will soon power the Muse agent, initially for paying subscribers, Meta says. The company hasn't given a specific date for that rollout.
The subscription math that has Wall Street interested
Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein estimates that 115 million subscribers paying $20 per month would generate roughly $28 billion in annual revenue. That's a hypothetical figure, not a company projection, but it frames why investors are watching how quickly Meta can convert its existing user base into Muse subscribers.
Wells Fargo's Ken Gawrelski raised his Meta price target to $1,000, up from his previous number. He expects Meta's own commentary to keep near-term revenue hopes modest, and he calls fiscal 2027 the earnings low point. In other words, the analysts who like the stock aren't expecting a quick payoff.
Meta hasn't disclosed how many Muse subscribers it has or what percentage of its users have signed up for Muse Code. Those numbers will matter more than benchmark charts if the company wants to justify the valuation Gawrelski and others are assigning to the stock.
Amazon's block and the fight over AI browsing
Not all the news around Muse has been positive. Last month, Amazon blocked Muse from its site, accusing the model of browsing without identifying itself. The dispute highlights a growing tension between AI developers and the platforms their models crawl. Meta hasn't said how it plans to resolve the standoff, and Amazon hasn't indicated whether the block is permanent.
For now, the incident hasn't dented Meta's share price. But it's a reminder that the regulatory and commercial environment for frontier AI is still unsettled, and that not every platform owner is eager to host Meta's models.
What to watch as Muse rolls out
The next concrete milestone is the Muse agent's launch for paying subscribers, which Meta says is coming soon but hasn't dated. After that, the company's next quarterly earnings call will be the first chance for executives to give real subscriber numbers rather than benchmark claims.
Until then, the stock sits in a holding pattern: up over the past month, down from its September high, and trading on expectations that the AI subscription business will eventually justify the price. Gawrelski's fiscal 2027 earnings trough call gives investors a timeline to argue about. Whether Muse Wonder can pull Meta's AI revenue anywhere close to Helfstein's $28 billion scenario is the open question heading into next year.
