Crouton Alpha, revealed. A soggy cartoon crouton in tomato soup says Zut alors beside a Baked by Meta stamp: an early version of Muse Ember. Free from 3 to 9 Nov 2026, named in French, blocked in France, with 1M context and audio, video and images in. Called it: Meta, and a new Muse.

Our clues said Crouton Alpha was a new model from Meta, not a Muse we knew. On 10 Nov, Meta named it an early version of Muse Ember, a new Muse released the day before.

By Stealth Models.

StealthMark 1.8.10 results for Crouton Alpha: benchmark score 48.0, General Intelligence 43.5, Visual Intelligence 56.0. Strongest at composing a whole scene: 60.7 on Beach.

Every StealthMark result of Crouton Alpha: Beach 60.7, Selfie 60.0, Latch 59.5, Raccoon 57.9, Ground Truth 50.5, Mona Lisa 44.9, Newton's Mirror 35.2, Foresight 32.3. Results for the early version tested as Crouton Alpha, not the released Muse Ember.

Compare it with Muse Wonder, a bigger Muse from Meta

The case file. First seen 3 Nov 2026, revealed 10 Nov 2026, developer Meta, context 1,048,576 tokens, input text, images, audio, video and files, tool calls yes, speed in our tests about 175 tok/s. 3 Nov 2026: appears free on OpenRouter and OpenCode with no developer's name, and both turn away our requests from Europe. 3 and 4 Nov 2026, our finding: only Meta's Muse models share its six reasoning levels, but its token counts match no model we know; our call, a new model from Meta. 9 Nov 2026: Meta releases Muse Ember, its smallest model, and four hours later OpenRouter retires Crouton Alpha. 10 Nov 2026: Meta names Crouton Alpha an early version of Muse Ember. Stealth access ended on 9 Nov 2026; Muse Ember is a paid API, and it answered our request from Europe.

See every clue and Meta's answer

Facts as text

Fact	Value
First seen	3 Nov 2026
Revealed	10 Nov 2026
Developer	Meta
Context	1,048,576 tokens
Input	Text, images, audio, video, files
Tool calls	Yes
Speed in our tests	about 175 tok/s
Access	Stealth access ended 9 Nov 2026; Muse Ember is a paid API ($0.10 in, $0.50 out per 1M tokens) and answered our request from Europe

Run it

Muse Ember is a closed model. Meta serves it only as an API, so there are no weights for us to turn into GGUF files.

See where Muse Ember runs and what it costs

StealthMark leaderboard
Text and images: CC BY 4.0, stealthmodels.com.

Downloads last month: -; Downloads are not tracked for this model. How to track

Inference Providers NEW

This model isn't deployed by any Inference Provider. 🙋 Ask for provider support

stealth-model
/

crouton-alpha

Run it

Space using stealth-model/crouton-alpha 1