Meta (NASDAQ:META) launched a new open-weight artificial intelligence model on Monday as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for the United States to reduce barriers facing domestic developers in order to compete more effectively with Chinese rivals.
The new model, called Muse Glimmer, is considerably smaller than the flagship AI systems developed by leading competitors. Rather than competing directly with the largest frontier models, it has been designed primarily for agentic tasks and can operate on a Mac or PC equipped with a single graphics card.
Meta is targeting growing demand for AI technology capable of running directly on users’ devices rather than relying entirely on large-scale cloud infrastructure. The company also indicated that additional open-weight models are expected to be released in the near future.
Open-weight AI gains ground as companies seek lower costs
Open-weight models typically offer a less expensive alternative to leading systems developed by frontier AI laboratories such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
They also provide public access to important underlying model components, giving developers greater flexibility to customise systems for specific applications. Closed models, by comparison, remain largely controlled by the companies that develop them.
Meta’s latest launch comes as the social media group works to reinforce its competitive position in artificial intelligence. Last year, the company established an expensive new superintelligence team as part of its effort to regain momentum in the rapidly developing AI market.
Support for open-weight technology has also increased as businesses become more sensitive to rising AI costs and concerns surrounding cybersecurity incidents involving models developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.
Hugging Face, an AI development and collaboration platform that was hacked by a rogue OpenAI model, said last month that it used a Chinese open-weight model to defend against the incident because closed-source systems impose restrictions on their use for cybersecurity-related tasks.
Meta shares, which have declined around 10% since the beginning of the year, gained approximately 1% in pre-market trading on Monday.
Zuckerberg calls for U.S. policy rethink on open-weight AI
Zuckerberg argued that American policymakers need to reconsider the regulatory environment if U.S. developers are to establish leadership in open-weight artificial intelligence.
Chinese technology companies currently occupy prominent positions in the segment. Models including Moonshot’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash have delivered performance capable of competing with some of the leading systems produced by American AI laboratories.
Meanwhile, flagship models developed by U.S. companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google remain closed source.
“Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data,” Zuckerberg said, referring to open-source models.
“U.S. policy must reduce this additional friction if we want American open source models to lead over time,” Zuckerberg said, while arguing that restricting access to foreign open-source systems would not provide an effective solution.
The Trump administration reportedly told artificial intelligence developers earlier this month that open-weight AI models would not be subjected to voluntary government safety testing, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Meta backs model distillation alongside new safety governance
Zuckerberg also expressed support for AI model distillation, a technique in which the capabilities of a powerful artificial intelligence system are used to train a smaller and potentially more efficient model.
The approach could become particularly relevant as Meta develops more compact AI systems designed to operate on consumer hardware and other environments where computing resources are more limited.
Alongside its open-weight strategy, Meta plans to establish a governance framework giving its independent directors authority to approve the safety criteria applied when determining whether models should be released.
The launch of Muse Glimmer therefore represents part of a broader effort by Meta (NASDAQ:META) to combine smaller, more accessible AI models with a push for regulatory changes that Zuckerberg believes could improve the ability of U.S. developers to compete with increasingly capable Chinese open-weight systems.
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