Meta built a whole new business to sell Muse to companies -- the same week Anthropic and Microsoft bet on two different answers to who gets paid

Meta announced on Sept. 28 that it is spinning its AI agent technology into a standalone business aimed squarely at companies, not consumers -- the third distinct answer in nine days to the question every AI lab is now racing to solve: once an agent can do the work, who actually gets paid for it. Meta Enterprise Platform bundles the consumer-facing Muse agent, a dedicated Meta Business Agent, and the Muse API and Muse Code developer tools into a single sales pitch, run by CJ Desai, MongoDB's former chief executive, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta's own framing leans entirely on scale it already has: the company says it "helps hundreds of millions of businesses reach customers" through its existing apps, and that the new platform exists to formalize that relationship into a paid product built on "advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses." Desai put it more simply in the announcement. Meta disclosed no pricing, no commission structure, and no launch-partner list beyond its own products.

“AI will fundamentally redefine how organizations of all sizes innovate, grow, serve customers, and run business operations.” — CJ Desai, Chief Enterprise Platform Officer, Meta, Sept. 28, 2026

Anthropic got there first, by five days. Claude Marketplace went live Sept. 23 as a single catalog split into three sections: over 2,000 connectors and plugins from partners including Atlassian, Google, Microsoft, Notion and Salesforce; a storefront of Claude-powered products from CrowdStrike, Cursor, Harvey, Legora, Lovable and Snowflake; and a directory of consulting partners -- Accenture, Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte -- for companies that want help rolling any of it out. The mechanism is different from Meta's from the ground up: Anthropic isn't selling its own vertical apps. It's renting the rails to partners who build them, and letting enterprise customers pay with committed spend -- money already contracted with Claude's API.

None of this is the industry's first attempt at the same idea. OpenAI opened its own App Directory in December, letting outside developers list ChatGPT-integrated apps -- a precedent Anthropic's marketplace explicitly extends by adding a way to pay for listed products with existing committed spend, and that Meta's new platform sidesteps entirely by selling its own agent directly instead of hosting anyone else's.

Microsoft's version of the same bet has been rolling out for longer and looks the least like a storefront of the three. Work IQ's APIs went live in June, letting agents read and act on Microsoft 365 data without stitching together dozens of separate endpoints by hand; a general preview arrives Sept. 30, bundled into the new Microsoft 365 E7 tier alongside Copilot and Agent 365. Rather than selling agents or a catalog of them, Microsoft is selling the thing an agent needs to be useful inside a specific company: a context graph built from a customer's own Dynamics 365 records, Power Platform apps, email and meetings, plus a business glossary for company-specific terms a generic model would otherwise guess at.

The clearest test of which bet actually pays off is the one none of the three has answered in public: does the platform operator take a cut, or does it make its money elsewhere? Anthropic came closest to a concrete number -- back in March, at a much smaller pilot version of the same idea with just three launch partners, the company was reported to be waiving the revenue share cloud marketplaces typically charge, which runs three to fifteen percent on AWS and Azure. Whether that policy survived the jump to a 2,000-partner catalog five days ago is something Anthropic has not said.

Meta has already run a smaller version of this bet once. Muse Code, its coding-agent product, launched in beta Aug. 5 with a Contributor tier priced as much as 21 times cheaper on output tokens than the standard rate, in exchange for letting Meta train future models on a developer's prompts and completions. Folding Muse Code into Meta Enterprise Platform now extends that same trade -- steep discounts priced partly in data rather than dollars -- to the rest of the new business line, though Meta hasn't said whether the same terms apply to the products it just bundled in.

What none of the three companies has said in public is the number that would actually settle which bet is winning: how much of an enterprise's agent budget each platform is capturing, and at what margin. Meta is betting that distribution it already owns beats a marketplace it doesn't; Anthropic is betting that being the neutral rail earns more loyalty than owning the vertical app would; Microsoft is betting that the company that already holds the data graph doesn't need to sell an agent at all. (Meta's own history runs the other way on this kind of bet -- Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought, not built from a standing start. A from-scratch enterprise sales business, rather than an acquisition, is a genuine change in how the company expands.) The first of the three to publish a number instead of a press release is the one that will have actually tested its own theory.