# Meta Muse Outpaces ChatGPT; Anthropic Cuts AI Costs

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-09-23

## Transcript

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Meta's Muse is outpacing ChatGPT's early mobile launch.
I'm Emron Shaikh, and your Daily Crunch, featuring three big tech headlines, starts right now.
Anthropics' newest model, Opus 5.5, was released on Tuesday, setting a new state-of-the-art encoding and knowledge work performance.
Notably, the release outpaces the larger Fable model in many benchmarks and succeeded in a number of informal tasks that Fable failed to complete.
In the announcement, Amthropic called Opus 5.5, the strongest performing model we've tested to date.
Now, the new model is also significantly cheaper than its predecessor.
Output tokens will be charged at $20 per Amtok for Opus 5.5 compared to $25 for the previous model.
Other metrics have similar price drops.
The model is also faster to run, reflecting an overall drop in the compute requirements.
The new version also makes significant changes to how Opus communicates, with the Opus 5.5 less likely to use jargon and more likely to put important information at the start of its messages.
Now, the launch comes just two months after the release of Opus 5 on July 24th.
According to the announcements, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 will be released in the coming weeks with similar performance improvements.
Anthropic says that Opus 5.5 is comparable to Mythos in its biology and cybersecurity capabilities, so its release is subject to the same safeguards as the company's Fable model.
Those safeguards limit how much the models can be used to discover exploits in compiled programs or developing recognizable biological weapons, among other tasks.
Eight months after it was spun out of TikTok, the social media platform's US unit, known as TikTokUSDS Joint Venture, is joining Lantern, a cross-platform child safety program launched by a group of tech companies.
Now, Lantern, launched in 2023, helps social media companies work together to securely share signals of harmful behavior and content in order to identify bad actors as they move across platforms.
Members in the program include Google, XSnap, Twitch, Anthropic, Meta, Discord, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox, Reddit, and a whole bunch more.
Cross-platform collaboration is essential to identifying and disrupting child sexual exploitation and abuse.
And TikTokUSDSJV's participation will help strengthen coordinated enforcement across the wider tech ecosystem, Lantern's director, Mark Leone, said in a statement.
Now, it makes sense for TikTok USDS to join Lantern, given most of its competitors are already participants in the program.
Through 2025, Lantern says that participant companies have shared over 2 million signals of potentially violating behavior.
As legally required of US-based companies, TikTok's US venture has been reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Cyber Tip Line when it becomes aware of child sexual abuse material, CSAM, and other threats to children's safety.
The company is now also committing $2 million to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's efforts to modernize its cyber tip line.
This National Center for Missing and Exploited Children project is expected to take three years and $10 million, with partners like AWS, Microsoft, and Palantir also contributing resources.
Meta's latest AI app, Muse, could be the social giant's next major hit, new data suggests.
According to just-released estimates from market intelligence provider Apptopia, Muse's app on mobile devices has been downloaded more times during its first 12 days on the market than ChatGPT was in the 12 days after its debut.
This data compares the US and Canada markets only.
Muse also has more daily active users than ChatGPT had at the time, the firm found.
Until now, it had been difficult to make an exact apples-to-apples comparison between these two apps, given that they had pursued different launch strategies.
When ChatGPT arrived on mobile, it was made available globally, but only on iOS.
Muse, meanwhile, is available across both Apple's App Store and Google Play, but only in the US and Canada.
To better align the numbers for comparison, Apptopia looked only at the iOS data for the US and Canada for both apps during the first 12 days of their respective launches.
In this subset of the data, Muse has now seen 1.8 million downloads to ChatGPT's 1.3 million.
Overall, Muse has seen 2.8 million total installs globally in its first 12 days, the firm also said.
Its growth hasn't yet stagnated either.
Muse has moved up from its original position as number two overall on the US App Store immediately after its launch to now number one, as Business Insider reported on Friday.
That jump put the app higher than ChatGPT, the outlet noted.
Another firm, AppFigure, said at the time that Muse had then crossed 1 million downloads.
In addition, Aptopia's data indicates that Muse's US daily active users are now higher than they were for ChatGPT at the same point after its launch.
When comparing just the US mobile app daily active users, Muse comes in higher with 642,000 daily users, compared with 231,000 for ChatGPT at the time.
To be fair to the fact that Muse is available across both iOS and Android, while ChatGPT launched on iOS only, Aptopia narrowed the comparison to iOS alone.
Yet even here, Muse is coming in higher with 359,000 daily active users on iOS, still above ChatGPT's figures from that time period.
Meta, which has been asked for comment, has not yet shared public figures related to Muse's early adoption.
Now to producer Dennis with the latest in startup business news, all in about one minute.
Thank you, Imran.
And Plastic's recycling startup, MacroCycle, announced a new deal with Meta on Tuesday that will help speed the development.
of its first commercial plant.
Three-year-old MacroCycle, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a novel way to process plastic waste that strips it of its contaminants, making the resulting recycled material more attractive to customers.
The startup says its technology generates 80% fewer carbon emissions than new, non-recycled virgin PET plastic, a common type of plastic used in bottles, containers, and textiles.
MacroCycle was a top 20 finalist in the 2025 Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
Under the terms of the agreement, Meta will pay MacroCycle for the rights to those avoided emissions, which lets Meta count the reduction toward its own carbon footprint, which is growing dramatically as a result of the AI boom.
A meta spokesperson confirmed that this is the first such deal that the company has signed.
MacroCycle says its demonstration plant will be capable of producing 5,000 metric tons of recycled plastic per year.
And folks, that's your Daily Crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Russell Brandom, Amanda Silberling, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
Same tech time, same crunch channel.
And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.