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Meta removes controversial AI feature on Instagram after backlash
4:55 PM PDT · July 10, 2026
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Meta has axed a controversial feature that allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI. The feature, which was rolled out earlier this week along with a batch of other AI tools, “missed the mark” and is no longer available, according to the company.
Earlier this week, Meta announced Muse Image, a new AI image generator built by Meta Superintelligence Labs, its dedicated AI unit. Meta promoted one feature that allowed individuals to generate images by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they wanted to reference. The feature, which wasn’t designed to alert a user if their photos were used in this way, prompted immediate backlash.
TechCrunch wrote its own guide on how to disable the feature.
Now Meta has reversed course. The company issued a blog post Friday announcing that it was removing the feature. Puck News founding partner Dylan Byers was the first to share the company’s decision.
“Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way,” the company posted on its blog. “We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.”
TechCrunch reached out to Meta for more information and will update this article if it responds.
Since its integration with social media platforms, AI has been misused with wild abandon — often to generate naked images of female celebrities. Platforms have attempted to mitigate this trend, although the guardrails introduced have often fallen short.
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In the case of Meta’s newly nixed feature, it seems somewhat obvious that it would have been abused in this way. Indeed, Byers notes that the decision to do away with the feature came “amid scrutiny from users and talent agencies, including CAA.”
Topics
AI, Instagram, Meta, social media
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Lucas Ropek
Senior Writer, TechCrunch
Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo.
You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com.
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Meta enters the crowded AI coding battle with Muse Spark 1.1
12:40 PM PDT · July 9, 2026
Meta publicly launched a new version of Muse Spark on Thursday, a multimodal AI model designed for agentic coding that aims to compete with similar products offered by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Spark 1.1, the first version of which was announced in April, can engage in multistep reasoning and handle complex processes, manage digital workflows, and deploy new features in enterprise systems, the company says.
Meta is a bit behind its competitors here; Anthropic and OpenAI have offered similar models for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean Meta’s entry into the market isn’t a threat.
An ongoing source of competitiveness within the AI industry remains the cost of usage, and Meta appears to be offering a competitive rate. Reuters reports that the company will charge $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. That puts it in line with (albeit slightly above) Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna.
Meta’s pitch to users is Spark’s ability to handle large agentic workloads, fix bugs, and help with large code migrations — the kind of automation that enterprises are increasingly turning to AI companies to provide.
“Muse Spark 1.1 delivers exceptional performance in personal agentic tasks that require planning and orchestration across a range of external apps and services,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Meta has released a handful of foundation AI models over the past few years. The Muse Spark release was apparently important enough to compel CEO Mark Zuckerberg to post on X for the first time in three years. Zuckerberg’s last post was in July 2023, around the time the platform rebranded from Twitter to X.
In his post, Zuckerberg called Spark “a strong agentic and coding model at a very low price,” noting that the model was “strongest at agentic performance, tool use, and computer use.”
Zuckerberg also noted that there was “more to come soon” — implying that the company plans to release additional models.
It’s been a big week for AI announcements — particularly for Meta, which also unveiled a new AI image-generation model on Tuesday, dubbed Muse Image. Other releases this week have included a ne w version of Grok from SpaceXAI and a new family of models from OpenAI, GPT-5.6, that also dropped Thursday. Suffice it to say that the competition within the AI industry is as healthy as ever, and companies that wish to stand out from their peers have their work cut out for them.
Topics
AI, Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, muse spark, OpenAI
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Lucas Ropek
Senior Writer, TechCrunch
Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo.
You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com.
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