Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for lower US barriers for open-source AI to better compete with Chinese rivals as the social media giant released a new open-weight model yesterday and said more would follow soon.
The new model, Muse Glimmer, is smaller than leading AI models from rivals and is instead designed to run agentic tasks on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, aiming to tap demand for AI systems that run directly on people’s devices.
“The notion AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg’s statement marks the latest show of support for open-weight AI, which is gaining traction as businesses grow wary of ballooning AI bills and worry about recent cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.
Open-weight models are typically cheaper than leading models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. They also come with publicly accessible core components for easy customization, unlike closed models that companies keep fully under their control.
Those controls are in the spotlight after Hugging Face, the AI coding collaboration hacked by a rogue OpenAI model, was forced to use a Chinese open-weight model to defend against the attack because closed-source models have curbs on cybersecurity use.
Chinese startups are leading the race for open-weight models, with Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash rivaling the performance of top US systems. By contrast, the leading models from US developers OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google are closed-weight.
Shares of Meta, which have fallen about 10 per cent so far this year, were up nearly 3pc in premarket trading yesterday.
Meta also plans to release the weights of Muse Spark 1.2, its most advanced model, built by a costly superintelligence team it formed last year to claw its way back into the AI race.
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