Mark Zuckerberg pledges vast AI spending as Meta takes aim at OpenAI and Anthropic

Mark Zuckerberg has a message for OpenAI and Anthropic: Meta is done playing catch-up, and it is bringing a very large checkbook. In an interview with the Financial Times, the Meta CEO committed to what he described as “vast spending” on artificial intelligence. The timing is deliberate. Meta says its new Muse Wonder family of AI models reached the frontier of AI capabilities as of October 12, 2026. Meta’s frontier claim, in numbers The Muse Wonder models are said to outperform Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5/Fable 5.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra on various technical tests. Meta is also not keeping the models in a lab. They are set to power the Muse agent app, which climbed to become the top-downloaded application in US app stores after launch. Zuckerberg also said Meta plans to speed up work on the next generations of its models. The price tag behind the push Meta’s capital expenditure for 2026 has been estimated at between $130 billion and $145 billion. More than $100 billion of that is earmarked for AI-related infrastructure. In 2025, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.3 billion. It also brought on Scale co-founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer to lead Meta’s Superintell...