<p id="speakable-summary" class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://www.arcee.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">Arcee</a>, a tiny 26-person U.S. startup that built a massive, 400B-parameter open source LLM on <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tiny-startup-arcee-ai-built-a-400b-open-source-llm-from-scratch-to-best-metas-llama/">a $20 million shoestring budget</a>, has released its new reasoning model. Arcee calls the model Trinity Large Thinking — and it’s the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” claims CEO Mark McQuade to TechCrunch.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">As that comment implies, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but root for: It wants to give U.S. and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a Chinese-based one.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">While Chinese models are extremely capable, they are <a href="https://cepa.org/article/the-ai-kill-switch-dangerous-chinese-open-source/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">perceived as risky</a>, putting power, and perhaps data, into the hands of a government that doesn’t share all of the Western world’s ideals.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">With Arcee, companies can download the model, train it to their own needs, and use it on premises. Companies can also use Arcee’s cloud-hosted version, accessible via API.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">While Arcee’s models are not outperforming the closed source models from the big labs like Anthropic or OpenAI, they’re not being held hostage by the whims of those giants, either. </p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For instance, Claude, with its exceptional abilities to code, has been a popular choice for users of open source AI agent tool OpenClaw. But Anthropic pulled the rug out from them last week when it told users that their Anthropic subscriptions <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/04/anthropic-says-claude-code-subscribers-will-need-to-pay-extra-for-openclaw-support/">will no longer cover OpenClaw usage</a> — they will have to pay additionally for that. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he was <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/15/openclaw-creator-peter-steinberger-joins-openai/">joining Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI</a>.)</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In contrast, McQuade proudly points to <a href="https://openrouter.ai/apps/openclaw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">data from OpenRouter</a> that says it has become one of the top models used with OpenClaw.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So, how good is Trinity Large Thinking? It is comparable to some of the other top open source models, according to the benchmark results it shared with TechCrunch.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tiny-startup-arcee-ai-built-a-400b-open-source-llm-from-scratch-to-best-metas-llama/">As we previously reported</a>, it is not a head-to-head threat to the big cheese among U.S.-built open models: Meta’s Llama 4. But it also doesn’t have the odd, not-really <a href="https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not-open-source" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow">open source license issues</a> of Meta’s model. All of Arcee’s Trinity models are released under the gold standard for OS licenses, Apache 2.0.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Just to be clear, there are also countless other U.S. startups offering open source models and, as a fan of the ingenuity of startups, I’m rooting for them, too.</p>
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