Meta releases Muse Ember, a cheap hosted model for agent sub-tasks
Announced · Published · By Contractor AI Shop
Meta released Muse Ember (muse-ember-1.0), a small hosted model for the repeat work agents do: tool calls, coding sub-tasks, routing, extraction and long-document parsing. Meta lists $0.10 input and $0.50 output per million tokens for prompts up to 200K, with a 1M-token context.
Key facts
- Meta announced Muse Ember on Nov 9, 2026, as its smallest Muse model, built for tool calls, coding sub-tasks, routing, extraction and long-document parsing. It is available today on Muse Code and the Meta Model API as muse-ember-1.0. Meta AI Research
- On Meta's blog, pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens, $0.004 cached, and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 200K tokens. Above 200K, the rates are $0.30 / $0.012 / $1.50. Context is 1M tokens, with up to 512K output tokens. Meta AI Research
- The model is proprietary and hosted only; Meta did not release weights. Meta describes a 'Muse Wonder plans, Muse Ember handles the volume' pairing. Meta AI Research
- TechCrunch (Russell Brandom, Nov 9) and VentureBeat (Carl Franzen, Nov 9) covered the launch. This brief does not repeat benchmark or cost-per-task scores. TechCrunch (Russell Brandom)
Our take: what it means for contractors
The 'big model plans, small model does the volume' setup is how agent bills get cheaper, and it is relevant to anyone building agent workflows. Muse Ember is hosted only, so it does not change the local-model picture. What we run is still DeepSeek V4 Flash on oMLX on a Mac Studio; we have not timed Ember.
What we don't know yet
- Real production cost once prompts cross the 200K-token price jump
- Whether Meta will release weights later
Sources
- Meta AI Research · Introducing Our Smallest, Most Efficient Model: Muse Ember · 2026-11-09 · Primary
- TechCrunch (Russell Brandom) · Meta releases Muse Ember, a new lightweight model for agent execution · 2026-11-09 · Secondary
- VentureBeat (Carl Franzen) · Meta's proprietary Muse Ember nearly matches Claude Haiku 5.5 at 1/3 the estimated per-task cost · 2026-11-09 · Secondary