Meta Is Back in the AI Race, HeyGen’s Hyper-Realistic Avatar, Anthropic’s Agent Builder Opens Up

Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of April 9th, 2026. Meta’s Superintelligence Labs shipped its first model — Muse Spark — nine months after Alexandr Wang took over and rebuilt the AI stack from scratch, with the multimodal reasoning model landing competitive benchmarks against Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 on reasoning, while Meta leans hard into health as its differentiator. HeyGen released Avatar V, a model that builds a full realistic video avatar from a 15-second phone recording and claims to have solved identity drift — the issue where AI-generated faces gradually stop resembling the real person. Plus, Anthropic opened a public beta for Claude Managed Agents, letting developers go from idea to live agent product in days without any backend infrastructure work — and a community workflow from a serious amateur photographer who used ChatGPT to write custom Photoshop scripts that simulate in-camera multiple exposure techniques she teaches to other photographers.