We can’t help but root for small open source AI model maker Arcee

Arcee, a small 26-employee American startup that built a massive 400B parameter open source LLM on a budget of just $20 million, has released a new inference model. Arcee calls this model Trinity Large Thinking, and CEO Mark McQuade claims to TechCrunch that it’s the most capable open-ended model “ever released by a non-Chinese company.”

As this comment shows, Arcee has goals I can’t help but root for. It’s that we want to give US and Western companies a model that doesn’t give them a reason to use a China-based model.

It is recognized that while the Chinese model is very capable, it risks putting power, and perhaps data, into the hands of governments that do not share all the ideals of the West.

Arcee allows businesses to download models, train them for their needs, and use them on-premises. Businesses can also use a cloud-hosted version of Arcee, which is accessible via an API.

Arcee’s models don’t outperform closed-source models from big labs like Anthropic or OpenAI, but they aren’t held hostage to the whims of those giants either.

For example, Claude has excellent coding skills and is popular with users of the open source AI agent tool OpenClaw. But Anthropic withdrew its suit last week, telling users that Anthropic’s subscription no longer covers the use of OpenClaw and they would have to pay an additional fee. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger announced that he would be joining Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI.)

In contrast, McQuade proudly points to OpenRouter’s data that shows it has become one of the top models used by OpenClaw.

So how good is Trinity Large Thinking? This is on par with some of the other top open source models, according to benchmark results shared with TechCrunch.

As we previously reported, this is not a direct threat to Meta’s Llama 4, which is a big cheese among American-made open models. But it also doesn’t have the weird licensing issues that come with Meta’s model, which isn’t really open source. All of Arcee’s Trinity models are released under Apache 2.0, the gold standard for OS licensing.

As a reminder, there are countless other startups in the US that offer open source models. As a fan of startup ingenuity, I’m rooting for them too.