Inkling
Inkling is a model family from Thinking Machines Lab23, with 2 assessed releases in this catalog. Licenses and availability are recorded for each release, not for the family; its releases use the Apache License 2.0.
Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's family of open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts models that accept text, image, and audio input and produce text. The first release, Inkling (975B total and 41B active parameters), was published on July 15, 2026, followed by Inkling-Small (276B total and 12B active) on July 30, 2026.123
- Model hub: Thinking Machines Lab on Hugging Face (external site: huggingface.co)
- Release notes: Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Releases assessed
| Release | Weights | Tier (USASI rubric v0.2) | License | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inkling (975B) | Weights: Public | Model-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight | Apache-2.0 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Inkling-Small | Weights: Public | Model-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight | Apache-2.0 | Jul 30, 2026 |
What it is useful for
The developer presents the family as a general base for customization and fine-tuning, including through its Tinker platform.1
Organization context
In the news
Thinking Machines Lab releases Inkling-Small, a smaller open-weight Inkling model
On July 30, 2026 Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling-Small, which it describes as a mixture-of-experts transformer with 276B total and 12B active parameters, trained on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems. The announcement says that, like Inkling, it reasons natively over audio and images, offers variable thinking effort, and supports a context window of up to 1M tokens, and that an earlier checkpoint was post-trained partly through on-policy distillation with Inkling as the teacher. The company says it is releasing the full weights and offering the model for fine-tuning on Tinker; the Hugging Face listing is ungated and licensed under Apache 2.0. USASI has not tested Inkling-Small.
Thinking Machines Lab releases Inkling, its first open-weight model, under Apache 2.0
On July 15, 2026 Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a model it says it trained from scratch and published with full weights. The announcement describes a mixture-of-experts transformer with 975B total and 41B active parameters, a context window of up to 1M tokens, and native reasoning over text, images, and audio, and calls it the first in a family of models of different sizes. The weights are published on Hugging Face without gating under the Apache 2.0 license, and the model is also available for fine-tuning on the company's Tinker platform. The announcement says some reported results came from a different checkpoint than the one released. USASI has not tested Inkling.
U.S. eligibility
Sources
This listing is not an endorsement, a safety assessment, or a federal approval.
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APA style
USASI. (2026, September 29). Inkling. United States of America Superintelligence. https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/open/inkling/
BibTeX
@misc{usasi_inkling,
author = {{USASI}},
title = {Inkling},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
howpublished = {\url{https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/open/inkling/}},
note = {United States of America Superintelligence. Last updated 2026-09-29}
}The date is when this page was last updated. Add the date you read it if your style needs one.
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