Best Open-Weight Models, Ranked by Capability (August 2026)
Sixteen downloadable-weight models ranked by capability and licence, with every parameter count and licence re-checked against the Hugging Face API.
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#glm
Open Source AI Wins: A Chinese Lab Tops SWE-Bench, Alibaba Ships a 3B-Active Coding Giant, and Microsoft Tackles Agent Security
Z.ai's GLM-5.1 beats GPT-5.4 on coding benchmarks under MIT license. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B runs frontier-level code with 3B active params. Microsoft open-sources agent governance for all 10 OWASP risks.
Open Source AI Wins: GLM-5.1 Beats Every Closed Model on SWE-Bench Pro, Bonsai Fits an 8B Model in 1.2 GB, and MCP Hits 97 Million
An open-weight model tops the hardest coding benchmark for the first time. A 1-bit LLM runs on a phone. And the protocol connecting AI to everything just passed React's adoption curve.
Open-Weight LLM Showdown Week 9: Six Labs, One License, and the Speed War That Decides Everything
Google, Alibaba, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI, and Zhipu all ship competitive open-weight models under permissive licenses. The battleground shifts from benchmarks to inference speed on your actual GPU.
Open-Weight LLM Showdown Week 5: Qwen 3.5 Dominates, Nemotron 3 Super Redefines Efficiency
Qwen 3.5's MoE models hit S-tier benchmarks, NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Super delivers 5x throughput gains, and GLM-4.7-Flash brings frontier coding to consumer GPUs. The open-weight race just accelerated.
Open-Weight LLM Showdown: Qwen3, Llama 4, GLM-5, and Gemma 3 on Real Hardware
Forget the marketing - here's how the latest open-weight models actually perform on your GPU, from 8GB budget cards to 24GB workstations.