What Happened?
Shares of social network operator Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) jumped 1.7% in the afternoon session after early traction for its new Muse artificial intelligence agent continued to drive market optimism ahead of the Meta Connect conference.
Barron's reported that OpenAI and Anthropic's new models are not the threat to Meta Platforms' Muse that a model launch would normally be. OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5. Barron described them as relatively low-cost models meant to answer complaints about the rising cost of frontier systems, and said they come with impressive performance on independent benchmarks.
Those launches were still overshadowed by Muse, Meta's personal assistant for ordinary users, including customer-service tasks.
Anthropic is unlikely to launch a Muse competitor. It sells mainly to businesses, and earlier this month it gave retailers blueprints to build shopping and merchant agents on Claude rather than releasing those products itself, Barron's reported. The labs may also have been distracted by the safety debate.
Separately, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Anthropic's initial public offering is now aimed at November. OpenAI is harder to dismiss. The ChatGPT developer has already discussed its own personal assistant, The Information reported, as cited by Barron's.The lead is on the product calendar, not a locked market.
After the initial pop, the shares cooled down to $748.11, up 1.5% from the previous close.
Is now the time to buy Meta? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
What Is The Market Telling Us
Meta’s shares are quite volatile and have had 16 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 2 days ago when the stock gained 8.6% on the news that sentiment improved as attention shifted to the company’s AI products — the new Muse personal agent, the Muse Spark models behind it, Meta AI inside its apps, and AI glasses — heading into this week’s Meta Connect conference.
Meta launched Muse in the U.S. on September 8 as a personal AI agent that can send email, book travel, fill out forms, and keep working after the app closes, the company said. It runs on Muse Spark, which Meta has called its most capable model for that kind of task, and is available on iOS, Android, muse.ai, and WhatsApp, with glasses support still to come. The same model already powers Meta AI in the Meta AI app and is rolling across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Meta’s glasses.
Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski kept an Overweight rating and raised his price target to $796 from $640, according to TheFly, saying recent model launches and early Muse traction give Meta “a story to tell” at Connect on September 23–24. The firm, citing SensorTower, said U.S. Muse downloads hit a record 264,000 on September 19 and daily active users reached 448,000 on September 18.
Meta is up 15% since the beginning of the year, and at $748.11 per share, it is trading close to its 52-week high of $760.66 from September 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Meta’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,162.
ONE MORE THING: 3 Hidden Platforms Growing 3X Faster than Amazon, Google, and PayPal. Amazon, Google, and Meta all followed the same playbook: Dominate an ignored market. Build an unbeatable moat. Scale until you’re unstoppable.
These three platforms are running that exact playbook right now. The early investors in Amazon made fortunes. The early investors in these could do the same. Get All 3 Stocks Here for FREE.
