Apriel
Family overview — summarizes releases; licenses and availability belong to each release.
Maintained by ServiceNow (SLAM lab)16
Apriel is ServiceNow's series of small open-weight language models, built by its SLAM (ServiceNow Language Models) lab. Apriel-5B was the first release. It was followed by 15B-parameter reasoning models: Apriel-Nemotron-15b-Thinker, the multimodal Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker, and Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker (December 2025). In April 2026 ServiceNow released Super Apriel, a 15B model derived from Apriel 1.6 whose layers can switch between attention and linear-time mixers at inference time.234781
- Model hub: ServiceNow-AI on Hugging Face (external site: huggingface.co)
- Paper: Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker technical report (arXiv 2510.01141) (external site: arxiv.org)
- Paper: Super Apriel: One Checkpoint, Many Speeds (arXiv 2604.19877) (external site: arxiv.org)
- Repository: Fast-LLM training library (external site: github.com)
Releases assessed
| Release | Weights | Tier (USASI rubric v0.1) | License | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apriel-1.6-15B-Thinker | Weights: Public | Model-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.1): Open-weight | MIT | Dec 9, 2025 |
| SuperApriel-15B-Instruct | Weights: Public | Model-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.1): Open-weight | MIT, Apache-2.0 | Apr 2026 |
What it is useful for
ServiceNow describes the Apriel models as general-purpose instruction models for code assistance, multi-step reasoning, question answering, function calling, and agent use cases, and says they are not meant for safety-critical use without human oversight.6
Organization context
Provenance and derivatives
The Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker report says the model started from Mistral AI's Pixtral-12B-Base-2409 (using a copy hosted by Unsloth) and was depth-upscaled from 40 to 48 decoder layers before continued pretraining. Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker builds on Apriel 1.5, and Super Apriel is distilled from Apriel 1.6.56910
- Derived from: Pixtral-12B-Base-2409 (Mistral AI) (external site: huggingface.co) — Starting checkpoint for Apriel 1.5; published by Mistral AI under Apache 2.0.
U.S. eligibility
Eligible · basis: U.S.-governed project
The Apriel models are developed and published by ServiceNow, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Apriel 1.5 and later releases build on Pixtral-12B-Base-2409, a base model published by Mistral AI, so that base is not treated as ServiceNow-developed. Eligibility of each release is assessed on the release record.1115
Sources
This listing is not an endorsement, a safety assessment, or a federal approval.