Arceea small 26-person US startup building a large, 400B parameter open source LLM. $20 million budgetreleased a new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking — and it’s “the most capable open-weight model released by a non-Chinese company,” CEO Mark McQuade claims to TechCrunch.
As you can see from this comment, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but want: to give US and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a China-based model.
Although the Chinese models are extremely skilled, they are perceived as riskyplacing power and perhaps information in the hands of a government that does not share all the ideals of the Western world.
With Arcee, companies can download the model, train it according to their needs, and use it in buildings. Companies can also use the cloud-hosted version of Arcee, which can be accessed through an API.
Although Arcee’s models are not superior to the closed source models of large laboratories such as Anthropic or OpenAI, they are not hostage to the whims of these giants.
For example, Claude has been a popular choice for users of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent tool, with its exceptional coding capabilities. But Anthropic pulled the rug out from under them last week when it notified users that they had an Anthropic subscription. will no longer cover the use of OpenClaw — they will have to pay extra for it. (OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger said in February Anthropic’s biggest competitor joins OpenAI.)
In contrast, McQuade points out with pride Data from OpenRouter He says it has become one of the best models used with OpenClaw.
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So how good is Trinity Large thinking? According to the benchmark results it shared with TechCrunch, it compares favorably with some of the other best open-source models.
As we reported earlierit’s not a head-to-head threat to the big cheese among US-made outdoor models: Meta’s Llama 4. But it’s not weird either, not really. open source license issues Meta model. All of Arcee’s Trinity models are released under the gold standard for OS licenses, Apache 2.0.
To be clear, there are countless other US startups offering open source models, and as a fan of startup ingenuity, I root for them.
