I can’t help rooting for tiny open source AI model maker Arcee

Arceea small US startup with 26 employees that built a massive open source LLM with 400 billion parameters on a shoestring budget of $20 million, 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,” CEO Mark McQuade tells TechCrunch.

As that comment implies, Arcee has a goal that I can only get behind: it wants to give American and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a China-based model.

Although Chinese models are extremely capable, they are perceived as riskyputting power, and perhaps also 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 own needs and use it on location. Companies can also use the cloud-hosted version of Arcee, accessible via API.

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

For example, Claude, with his exceptional coding skills, has been a popular choice for users of the open source AI agent tool OpenClaw. But Anthropic pulled the rug out last week when it told users that their Anthropic subscriptions no longer cover the use of OpenClaw — they’ll have to pay extra for it. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he was joining Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI.)

McQuade, on the other hand, points it out proudly data from OpenRouter that says it has become one of the top models used with OpenClaw.

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.

As we previously reported, it’s not a direct threat to the big cheese among US-built open models: Meta’s Llama 4. But it doesn’t have the strangeness either, not really open source licensing issues from Meta’s model. All Arcee Trinity models are released under the gold standard for OS licensing, Apache 2.0.

To be clear, there are also countless other US startups offering open source models, and as a fan of startup ingenuity, I support them as well.