Model release

Inkling-Small

Inkling-Small is an open-weight model release in the Inkling family from Thinking Machines Lab1 3, version Inkling-Small, released Jul 30, 2026. Its weights can be downloaded by the public3 1 under the Apache License 2.03 1.

Inkling-Small is a 42-layer decoder-only mixture-of-experts transformer with 276B total and 12B active parameters, routing each token to 6 of 256 experts plus 2 shared experts. Like Inkling, it accepts text, image, and audio input, outputs text, and supports a context window of up to 1M tokens.1 2

Model hub: Hugging Face (BF16) (external site: huggingface.co)
Model hub: Hugging Face (NVFP4) (external site: huggingface.co)
Documentation: Inkling-Small Model Card (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Release notes: Introducing Inkling-Small (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
License: Model Acceptable Use Policy (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)

On AI on Hugging Face: thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small, thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small-NVFP4

Last reviewedSep 29, 2026Entry updated Sep 29, 2026Documented release Jul 30, 2026

Availability and license

Overall availability

Public

BF16 and NVFP4 checkpoints are downloadable from Hugging Face without gating; the developer's Model Acceptable Use Policy also applies.3 4

Availability fact review: not separately recorded

Availability is separate from permission: read the license before using or redistributing.

Apache License 2.0 (external site: apache.org)3 1
Applies to: Weights · SPDX Apache-2.0 · on the rubric’s OSI-approved software-license list · fact-level rights review not recorded
Plain-language guide to the Apache License 2.0

The Hugging Face repository declares Apache 2.0 in its metadata and links to the Apache license text; it has no separate LICENSE file. The developer's Model Acceptable Use Policy states that anyone who accesses, downloads, or uses its model materials agrees to be bound by it, and it lists prohibited uses.3 4

Component reuse rights

A readable or downloadable component is not automatically reusable. These indicators concern recorded license evidence, not system certification.

weights: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review
code: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review
data: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review
documentation: Unknown — no complete fact-level rights review

No complete system-rights review is recorded for this release.

Model-disclosure tier

Computed from the checklist below using USASI rubric v0.2. An editorial category, not a certification.

Open-weight

The model parameters for this release can be downloaded by the public. License terms may still restrict use, redistribution, or commercial use.

How tiers are computed

Public materials checklist

Items for a model under USASI rubric v0.2. Unknown means unassessed or insufficient evidence.

Public materials checklist for Inkling-Small
Item	Status	Notes and evidence
WeightsCan the general public download the model parameters for this release?	Public	Published as a BF16 checkpoint and a separate NVFP4-quantized checkpoint.3 1
Inference codeIs code for running the model published?	Public	The model card documents deployment with open-source SGLang, vLLM, TokenSpeed, Unsloth, and Hugging Face Transformers.1 3
Training codeIs the code used to train the model published?	Unknown	Not assessed.
Training-data informationDoes the information cover provenance, scope, acquisition, selection, labeling, processing, and where data or alternatives can be obtained? Access alone does not establish completeness.	Unknown	Not assessed.
Training-data accessCan the training data be obtained? This is independent of information completeness and reuse rights; original unshareable data need not be downloadable.	Unknown	Not assessed.
Complete training pipelineIs the complete base-training and preprocessing pipeline published, including configuration? Fine-tuning code or an inference SDK alone is insufficient.	Unknown	Not assessed.
Legacy data assessment (v0.1)Historical assessment combining download access and disclosure. Preserved for traceability; excluded from the v0.2 tier calculation. See the new separate assessments above.	Partial	The model card and training-data documentation describe source categories (public, third-party, and synthetic data), deduplication, and filtering; the release post says the pretraining data mix differs from Inkling's. The data is not released.1 5 2
Training recipeAre the training configuration and procedure documented in enough detail to follow?	Partial	The release post describes, at a high level, changes to the pre-training data mix and recipe, post-training that used on-policy distillation from Inkling in part, and further agentic-coding reinforcement learning.2
Evaluation materialsPublic = evaluation code or prompts that let others re-run the evaluations are published. Partial = results only.	Partial	Benchmark results are published in the model card and as evaluation result files in the Hugging Face repository.3

What it is useful for

The model card describes use by developers building agentic and tool-use systems, coding assistants, chatbots, and retrieval-augmented generation systems.1

Run and use notes

Documented facts only. No hardware or performance claims are made without a cited source and stated assumptions.

The model card states that the BF16 checkpoint needs at least 600 GB of aggregated GPU memory (for example 4x NVIDIA B300 or 8x H200), and that the NVFP4-quantized checkpoint needs at least 180 GB (W4A4 on 1x B300, which requires SM100+ architecture, or W4A16 on 2x H200).1

Organization context

Thinking Machines Lab

Provenance and derivatives

Thinking Machines Lab says Inkling-Small was pretrained with a changed data mix and recipe, and that an earlier checkpoint was post-trained in part using on-policy distillation with Inkling as the teacher, followed by further agentic-coding reinforcement learning.2

Derived from: Inkling — Teacher model for on-policy distillation during post-training; not a weight initialization.

Other releases in the Inkling family

Inkling (975B)Model-disclosure tier (USASI rubric v0.2): Open-weight

Inkling family overview

In the news

Dated, sourced updates in this catalog's news that mention this entry.

Jul 30, 2026 · Release
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.

What this catalog does not know

Unknown means the sources reviewed for this record do not document it. It is not evidence that something does not exist.

Training code: unknown.
Training-data information: unknown.
Training-data access: unknown.
Complete training pipeline: unknown.

Have a primary source? How to report a correction.

U.S. eligibility

Project eligibility rests on documented governing or maintaining entities, not on contributors.

Eligible · basis: U.S. headquarters

The model card names Thinking Machines Lab, Inc. as the model provider; the company states in its privacy notice that it is based in the United States (see the organization record for the San Francisco headquarters assessment).1 6

Assessed Sep 29, 2026

Sources

1.
Inkling-Small Model Card (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Thinking Machines Lab · Model card · published Jul 30, 2026 · accessed Sep 29, 2026
2.
Introducing Inkling-Small (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Thinking Machines Lab · Announcement · published Jul 30, 2026 · accessed Sep 29, 2026
3.
thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small (external site: huggingface.co)
Thinking Machines Lab (Hugging Face) · Model card · accessed Sep 29, 2026
4.
Model Acceptable Use Policy - Thinking Machines Lab (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Thinking Machines Lab · License · published Jul 15, 2026 · accessed Sep 29, 2026
5.
Training Data Documentation - Thinking Machines Lab (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Thinking Machines Lab · Documentation · accessed Sep 29, 2026
6.
Privacy Notice - Thinking Machines Lab (external site: thinkingmachines.ai)
Thinking Machines Lab · Official page · published May 19, 2026 · accessed Sep 29, 2026

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This listing is not an endorsement, a safety assessment, or a federal approval.

Cite this page

APA style

USASI. (2026, September 29). Inkling-Small. United States of America Superintelligence. https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/open/inkling-small/

BibTeX

@misc{usasi_inkling_small,
  author = {{USASI}},
  title = {Inkling-Small},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  howpublished = {\url{https://unitedstatesofamericasuperintelligence.com/open/inkling-small/}},
  note = {United States of America Superintelligence. Last updated 2026-09-29}
}

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