Meta's Muse Spark 1.2 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max land in the frontier top ten

The first week of August delivered two frontier entrants within three days of each other, both measured by Artificial Analysis and both now on the leaderboard.

Muse Spark 1.2: Meta’s proprietary turn

Muse Spark 1.2, released August 5, 2026, scores 57 on the AA Intelligence Index — ahead of every previous Meta model — with text, image, speech, and video input at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output. The strategic fact is bigger than the score: this is Meta shipping a proprietary frontier model rather than open weights, a reversal of the Llama-era posture that defined the company’s AI positioning. Its serving performance is not yet benchmarked, and the API ecosystem around it is days old.

Qwen3.8 Max: flagship scores at mid-tier prices

Qwen3.8 Max, released August 3, 2026, scores 58 — fourth among all tracked models — at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, with text, image, and video input. No other model above 55 on the index prices output under $10; Qwen prices it at $6. In our head-to-head against GPT-5.6 Sol, that works out to 95% of the flagship measurement at roughly a fifth of the blended cost.

The pattern

Both entrants attack the same seam: the gap between mid-tier prices and flagship capability. With Gemini 3.6 Flash’s output cut to $7.50 and DeepSeek V4 Flash anchoring the floor at $0.28, the price of measured intelligence continues to fall on every tier — the through-line of 2026’s API market. Every figure above carries its measurement date on the relevant model page; the dataset refresh that accompanies these additions is documented in today’s refresh note.