---
title: "Open-Weight Models in 2026: How Many Launch Open?"
date: 2026-09-28
url: https://modevc.com/charts/open-weight-models-2026/
keywords: ["open weight models 2026", "open weight llm", "open vs closed ai models"]
publisher: Mode VC
---

# Open-Weight Models in 2026: How Many Launch Open?

Few launches since July said their weights were public, and none came from the three biggest US labs. Open weights now arrive mostly as specialist parts.

## Chart: Of 51 named model launches since 6 Jul 2026, 22 stated their weights: 18 closed, 4 open. All 16 from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic were closed.

Named model launches by stated weight status, 6 Jul 2026 – 28 Sept 2026. Not stated = neither the lab post nor the tracker said.

| Weight status | Launches | Labs |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights | 4 | Tencent, Black Forest Labs, NVIDIA |
| Closed: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic | 16 | OpenAI, Google, Anthropic |
| Closed: other labs | 2 | Alibaba Qwen, Meta |
| Not stated: labs in China | 17 | Tencent, Moonshot, Alibaba Qwen, ByteDance, Z.ai, DeepSeek |
| Not stated: other labs | 12 | Meta, xAI, NVIDIA, Runway |

Note: Launch-feed rows as listed; a post naming several variants counts once. 29 of 51 rows do not state weights; all of them are tracker rows (6 Jul 2026 – 22 Sep) that rarely record it, so the open count is a floor. In the lab-post sweep from 23 Sep (7 rows) every row states it: 3 open, 4 closed. NV-Reason-CT rests on a single aggregator listing. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has conflicting reports, so it is left as not stated.

## The signal

- **Launches:** [Claude Sonnet 5.5](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-5-5) (28 Sept 2026): Faster and cheaper than Sonnet 5 on most work, with better agentic coding scores. Closed weights, $2/$10 per million tokens.
- **Launches:** [FLUX 3 Action](https://bfl.ai/models/flux-3-action) (23 Sept 2026): Open 7B world-action model that predicts robot motion and video together. Released under the FLUX Kommunity License.
- **Launches:** Tencent's Hy4 Preview (28 Aug 2026, per launch trackers) is the only open-weight launch in the feed before 23 Sep.

## The Mode read

Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5.5 today with closed weights, like every OpenAI, Google and Anthropic launch since July. On 23 Sept 2026, 5 days earlier, Black Forest Labs and NVIDIA released 3 open models. So how often do labs put weights in the open?

Rarely, where we can tell. Of **51** named launches since 6 Jul 2026, 22 stated their weight status: **18 closed and 4 open**. All 16 launches from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic were closed. The other 29 did not say, and 17 of those came from labs in China. The open ones are telling: 3 of the 4 are specialist models, for robot actions, speaker diarization and CT scans, not general assistants.

The general frontier is a closed product. Open weights now arrive as parts: small, focused models that a team can run on its own hardware and tune on its own data. A part is worth most to whoever controls where it runs and what data it sees. That is usually a company already inside the customer's building, such as a hospital, a factory or a robot fleet, not the lab that trained it.

> The frontier stays closed. Open weights arrive as parts, and parts go to whoever owns the assembly line.

**What we would back:** Vertical products that run open specialist models inside the customer’s own walls: a hospital, a factory, a robot fleet.

## Sources

- [Official launch posts, 23 Sep onward (launch feed)](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-5-5)
- [Launch trackers for earlier rows (llmgateway, thursdai)](https://thursdai.news)