Meta releases Muse Glimmer open-weight model as Zuckerberg pushes U.S. policy shift

Meta on Monday released Muse Glimmer, a new open-weight AI model, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for lower U.S. barriers so American open-source models can better compete with Chinese rivals, Reuters reported. Reuters said Muse Glimmer is much smaller than leading models from rivals, is designed for agentic tasks, and can run on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, targeting AI that runs on users' devices. Open-weight models typically cost less than frontier systems from labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic and expose core components for customization, unlike closed models, the report said. Zuckerberg said U.S. firms face extra training-data restrictions that give foreign labs advantages, and that U.S. policy must reduce that friction if American open-source models are to lead. He said restricting access to foreign open-source models is not an effective solution. Chinese systems cited by Reuters include Moonshot's Kimi K3, Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max, and DeepSeek's V4-Flash. In a separate Axios interview tied to a lengthy manifesto, Zuckerberg said the biggest AI risk is that one government or entity holds too much power over the technology, and that putting the technology in everyone's hands is a path to empowerment and checks and balances. Axios said Meta is opening Muse Glimmer's weights, plans to open weights for a version of foundational model Muse Spark 1.2 in coming weeks, and will give independent directors power to approve model-release safety criteria. Axios also reported Meta is launching a Future is for Everyone Fund seeded with $1 billion for U.S. communities where it owns and operates data centers.