Meta reaffirms unwavering commitment to openness by closing everything

Company announces that the path forward, long believed to lead outward, in fact terminates in a locked room

MENLO PARK — Meta Platforms today reaffirmed its long-standing commitment to open-source artificial intelligence by announcing it will no longer be doing any of it.

The company’s new flagship model, Muse Spark, launched April 8 with no open weights, no Hugging Face release, and no public API. Access is by invitation only. Meta clarified that this represents the next chapter in its open-source journey, a journey that has now arrived at its destination, which is a door.

“Openness drives innovation and is good for developers, good for Meta, and good for the world,” the company wrote in April 2025, eleven months before deciding it was actually quite bad for Meta. The post remains live on Meta’s website, where it can be read by anyone, an openness the company says it remains proud of.

Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta last June as part of a $14.3 billion acquisition of his previous company, posted that “nine months ago we rebuilt our AI stack from scratch.” Sources confirm the rebuild was already underway when Meta released Llama 4 with a blog post praising openness as the path forward, which it was, until it was the path backward, at which point a different team that had been there the whole time stepped forward to explain the real path had been somewhere else.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s October 2024 manifesto, “Open Source AI Is the Path Forward,” has been preserved as a historical document. Meta confirmed the path is still forward. The destination has been updated.

The 1.2 billion developers, researchers, and small businesses that downloaded Llama on the understanding that Meta’s open-source commitment was permanent have been invited to wait for a future open-source release, with a timeline Meta has described as “unspecified” and, in one internal Slack channel, as “lol.”

Markets responded enthusiastically. Meta’s stock rose 9% on launch day, suggesting investors agree that the path forward is closed.

Existing Llama models remain available for download. Meta has confirmed it will continue to maintain them, in the same sense that a museum maintains a fossil.