I can’t help but root for the little open source AI model maker Arcee

Arcee, a small American startup of 26 people that built a massive open source LLM program with 400B parameters on With a small budget of $20 millionreleased a new logic model. Arcee calls the model the Trinity Large Thinking — the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” CEO Mark McQuade tells TechCrunch.

As this comment suggests, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but support: he wants to give American and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a China-based model.

Although the Chinese models have enormous capabilities, they already are It is seen as riskyAnd putting power, and perhaps data, 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 specific needs, and use it locally. Businesses can also use the cloud-hosted version of Arcee, which is accessible via an application programming interface (API).

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

For example, Claude, with his exceptional programming abilities, has been a popular choice for users of the open source AI agent tool OpenClaw. But Anthropic pulled the rug out of them last week when it told users their subscriptions were Anthropic It will no longer cover the use of OpenClaw -They will have to pay extra for it. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said it was.) Joining Anthropic’s biggest competitor, OpenAI).

In return, McQuaid points out proudly Data from OpenRouter Which means it has become one of the best models used with OpenClaw.

So, how well does the Big Trinity think? It’s similar to some other open source models, according to benchmark results it shared with TechCrunch.

As we reported previouslyit’s not a direct threat to the big cheese among US-made open models: Meta’s Llama 4. But it also doesn’t have the weirdness, not really Open source licensing issues From the meta model. All Arcee’s Trinity models are released under the gold standard for operating system licenses, Apache 2.0.

Just to be clear, there are also countless US startups offering open source models, and as a fan of startup ingenuity, I’m rooting for those too.