Meta has launched Muse Image, its first AI image-generation model built entirely in-house, embedding it across the Meta AI app, Instagram and WhatsApp, and ending the company's dependence on licensed tools from Midjourney and Black Forest Labs for creative image work across its platforms.
The model, developed by Meta's Superintelligence Labs division, went live on July 7, 2026, in the United States. Instagram and WhatsApp each have more than 3 billion global users, though Muse Image will only be available in select countries at first. Meta plans to bring it to Facebook and Messenger next, which would extend the model's reach across essentially all of the company's consumer-facing products.
Muse Image is described as "agentic," meaning it works in tandem with Muse Spark, the large language model Meta launched on April 8, 2026. Before generating an image, the system reasons through a prompt, searches the web for context and plans its approach. The tool accepts complex text prompts, blends multiple photos into a single image, and allows iterative edits, tweaking one part of an image at a time rather than regenerating from scratch. It can also produce QR codes and render readable text inside images.
On Instagram specifically, Muse powers more than 30 new AI effects for Stories, while a Facebook Marketplace integration allows users to visualise how a used item might look in their home before purchasing. Muse is free for everyday creation, but users who exceed certain usage thresholds will need to subscribe to a paid Meta AI plan.
Meta says Muse Image performs strongly across several benchmarks, generally surpassing Google's Nano Banana 2 and trailing only ChatGPT's image generator. Advertisers will also be able to access Muse Image through Meta's Advantage+ creative tool in the coming weeks.
The image-model release comes amid reported frustration inside Meta over the pace of its AI progress. The company reassigned thousands of engineers to data labelling and other AI-related work, hurting morale, and paused a programme that used employees' work activity to collect AI training data after a privacy failure left potentially sensitive information broadly accessible inside Meta.
The launch comes as Meta is spending between $115 billion and $135 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. Meta's stock rose 3% on the day of the announcement, a signal that investors are at least provisionally convinced the products can justify that outlay. Meta has also confirmed that Muse Video, an AI video generation tool, is already in development, suggesting the company views Tuesday's launch as the opening move in a broader campaign to own the AI creative stack powering its platforms rather than renting it from rivals.
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