State of Open Weights — the open models we serve, and why
Open a model router today and you’ll find 400+ models — the same family in five quantizations, three deprecation states, a dozen providers with different latencies and silent fallbacks. Choice isn’t the product; it’s a tax. This report is the opposite: the small set of open-weight models we actually operate, each one there for a job, with the facts that matter — real license terms, architecture, context, current prices and scores — kept current so you never have to reconcile stale numbers across blog posts.
Sources: model facts from the official Hugging Face cards (linked per row); prices and Intelligence Index from Artificial Analysis, refreshed monthly by the same collector that updates the Pareto Frontier report.
The lineup
Section titled “The lineup”| Model | Pool | The job | Params | Context | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K2.7 | Frontier | Agentic coding, tool use — the newest Kimi | 1T MoE / 32B active | 256K | Modified MIT¹ |
| Kimi K2.6 | Frontier | Best open SWE-bench Verified score; pinned agent workflows | 1T MoE / 32B active | 256K | Modified MIT¹ |
| GLM 5.2 | Frontier | Top-scoring open model on the AA index; long-horizon coding | 753B MoE | 1M | MIT |
| MiniMax M3 | Frontier | 1M context + native multimodal input | ~428B MoE / 23B active | 1M | Community License² |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | Core | High-volume workloads: extraction, chat, summarization, RAG | 284B MoE / 13B active | 1M | MIT |
| MiMo V2.5 | Core | Budget multimodal; strongest coding card in its price class | 310B MoE / 15B active | 1M | MIT |
¹ Modified MIT: attribution required only above 100M MAU or $20M/mo revenue. ² MiniMax Community License: “Built with MiniMax M3” attribution; >$20M/yr revenue requires written authorization. “Open” is not one thing — MIT and Apache 2.0 mean unrestricted commercial use; community licenses sit between open and proprietary. For API consumers none of this matters day to day; it matters if you later self-host or embed weights in a product.
Current numbers
Section titled “Current numbers”| Model | Input $/M | Output $/M | AA Index | Headline benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K2.7 | $0.95 | $4.00 | 42 | MCP Mark Verified 81.1 (vendor suite) |
| Kimi K2.6 | $0.95 | $4.00 | 43 | SWE-bench Verified 80.2 · Pro 58.6 |
| GLM 5.2 | $1.40 | $4.40 | 51 | SWE-bench Pro 62.1 · Terminal-Bench 2.1 81.0 |
| MiniMax M3 | $0.30 | $1.20 | 44 | SWE-bench Verified 80.5 · Pro 59.0 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.14 | $0.28 | 40 | LiveCodeBench 91.6 |
| MiMo V2.5 | $0.105 | $0.28 | — | SWE-bench Pro 56.1 · Terminal-Bench 2 65.8 |
Prices are the vendors’ list prices per million tokens as tracked by Artificial Analysis (MiMo V2.5: OpenRouter listing — no AA entry yet). Benchmark scores are as published on each model’s official card; scaffolding differs between labs. Where these models sit against the closed flagships — and which are Pareto-efficient — is the Pareto Frontier report; tier-fair matchups are in the Which-LLM guide.
How to choose between the pools
Section titled “How to choose between the pools”Frontier when the work is agentic coding, multi-step agents, or anything where a failed run costs more than the tokens did. Core when the work is volume — extraction, classification, summarization, chat, pipelines that run all day. Both are flat-rate: no token caps during your reserved hours, so the per-token prices above stop mattering once you’re inside your window.
Changelog
Section titled “Changelog”- 2026-07-06 (first edition) — baseline roster: Kimi K2.7, Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.2, MiniMax M3 (Frontier); DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo V2.5 (Core). This report absorbs the per-model tables previously maintained in blog posts, which now link here instead of carrying their own copies of the numbers.
The live pool menu — with current block prices and availability — is always at cheapestinference.com/pools: Frontier from $44.20/mo, Core from $5.94/mo, one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API.