I can’t help but root for the little open source AI model maker Arcee

Arcee, a small 26-person American startup that built a massive, open source LLM program with 400B parameters on a shoestring budget of $20 million, has released its new inference model. Arcee calls the model the Trinity Large Thinking — the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” CEO Mark McQuade tells TechCrunch.

As this comment suggests, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but support: he wants to give American and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a China-based model.

Although Chinese models have enormous potential, they are seen as risky, putting power, and perhaps 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 specific needs, and use it locally. Businesses can also use the cloud-hosted version of Arcee, which is accessible via an application programming interface (API).

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

For example, Claude, with his exceptional programming abilities, has been a popular choice for users of the open source AI agent tool OpenClaw. But Anthropic pulled the rug out of them last week when it told users that their Anthropic subscriptions would no longer cover use of OpenClaw — and they would have to pay more for it. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he would join Anthropic’s biggest competitor, OpenAI.)

In contrast, McQuade proudly points to data from OpenRouter that he says has become one of the best models used with OpenClaw.

So, how well does the Big Trinity think? It’s similar to some other open source models, according to benchmark results it shared with TechCrunch.

As mentioned earlier, this isn’t a head-on threat to the big cheese among US-made open models: Meta’s Llama 4. But it also doesn’t have the weird, non-open source licensing issues that the Meta model does. All Arcee’s Trinity models are released under the gold standard for operating system licenses, Apache 2.0.

Just to be clear, there are also countless US startups offering open source models, and as a fan of startup ingenuity, I’m rooting for those too.