# Inkling-Small: Thinking Machines Ships a 12B-Active Open Model That Beats Its Big Sibling on Agent Work

DevFeed: [Inkling-Small: Thinking Machines Ships a 12B-Active Open Model That Beats Its Big Sibling on Agent Work](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/inkling-small-thinking-machines-ships-a-12b-active-open-model-that-beats-its-big-sibling-on-agent-work-56179.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.developersdigest.tech/blog/inkling-small-open-weights-2026>)

Author: Developers Digest

Published: 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z

Content type: release

Language: en

Sources: [Developers Digest](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/developers-digest.md>)

Topics: [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mixture-of-experts-moe.md>), [Parameter](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/parameter.md>)

Tags: [agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agent.md>), [agentic-ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic-ai.md>), [ai-models](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-models.md>), [llms](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/llms.md>), [model](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/model.md>), [moe](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/moe.md>), [news](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/news.md>), [open](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [open-weights](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-weights.md>), [parameter](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/parameter.md>), [small](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/small.md>), [thinking](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/thinking.md>), [tool-use](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tool-use.md>)

## AI overview

Thinking Machines has released Inkling-Small, a 276B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 12B active parameters per token, Apache 2.0 licensing, and open weights. The document reports stronger SWEBench Verified, HLE, and tool-use results than the larger Inkling model, with lower size and output cost.

## Source excerpt

Inkling-Small is a 276B-parameter MoE with 12B active per token, Apache 2.0, and open weights. It beats the 975B Inkling on SWEBench Verified (80.2), HLE (31.6), and tool use at a quarter of the size and a third of the output price.