Meta Platforms shares climbed 4.0% to $616.53 in early trading on Thursday, extending gains from the prior session, as investors reacted to the company’s latest artificial intelligence developments and the resolution of a major legal dispute.
The stock opened at $604.75 and reached an intraday high of $618.88, according to market data. The advance follows Tuesday’s close at $592.85 and marks a rebound from the 52-week low of $520.26 recorded earlier in the year.
Shares were supported by the public release of Muse Spark 1.3, Meta’s newest AI model, which the company’s Superintelligence Labs opened for paid developer access. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it as the company’s most significant breakthrough in coding and agentic work to date. On performance benchmarks, Muse Spark 1.3 scored 75.4 on the DeepSWE v1.1 evaluation, outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1. It also led in long-context retrieval with a score of 98.5 on the MRCR 256K–512K benchmark.
Meta also introduced Muse Voice Transcribe, a real-time speech recognition model from its Superintelligence Labs. Priced at $3 per 1,000 minutes of audio, the model achieved a 3.1% word error rate on the AA-WER Streaming English benchmark, surpassing offerings from OpenAI and Google.
Analysts at Bernstein SocGen Group reiterated an Outperform rating and raised their price target to $800, arguing that Meta’s AI-enhanced advertising platform is on track to surpass Google Search in total ad revenue by the end of 2026, excluding secondary Google ad products. UBS maintained a Buy recommendation with a $715 target, while KeyBanc kept an overweight rating at $780 and BofA Securities maintained a Buy with a $810 target.
The broader market showed modest gains, with the S&P 500 up 0.5% to 7,675.55, the Dow Jones rising 0.8% and the Nasdaq advancing 0.5%. Analysts also noted that the resolution of Meta’s primary social media litigation has removed significant legal uncertainty, potentially accelerating product release schedules and supporting the stock’s upward momentum.
