Arcéea small American startup of 26 people who built a massive open source LLM of 400 billion parameters on a restricted budget of 20 million dollarspublished his new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking – and it’s the highest-performing open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” CEO Mark McQuade tells TechCrunch.
As this comment indicates, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but champion: it wants to give American and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a China-based model.
Although the Chinese models are extremely efficient, they are perceived as riskyputting power, and perhaps data, in the hands of a government that does not share all the ideals of the Western world.
With Arcee, businesses can download the template, adapt it to their own needs and use it on-site. Businesses can also use the cloud-hosted version of Arcee, accessible via API.
Even if Arcee’s models do not outperform the closed models of large laboratories like Anthropic or OpenAI, they are not held hostage by the whims of these giants either.
For example, Claude, with his exceptional coding abilities, is a popular choice for users of the open source AI agent tool OpenClaw. But Anthropic pulled the rug out from under them last week by informing users that their Anthropic subscriptions will no longer cover the use of OpenClaw — they will have to pay extra for this. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he was joining Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI.)
On the other hand, McQuade proudly emphasizes OpenRouter data this means that it has become one of the best models used with OpenClaw.
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So how good is Trinity Large Thinking? It’s comparable to some of the other top open source models, according to benchmark results shared with TechCrunch.
As we previously reportedit’s not a direct threat to the big cheese among the open models built in the United States: the Meta’s Llama 4. But it doesn’t have the strangeness either, not really open source licensing issues of the Meta model. All Arcee Trinity models are released under the operating system licensing benchmark, Apache 2.0.
Just to be clear, there are also countless other US startups offering open source models and, as a fan of startup ingenuity, I support them as well.
