Tiny Startup Arcee Challenges Chinese AI With Open Model

Arcee, a 26-person startup with a $20 million budget, has released Trinity Large Thinking, claiming it is the most capable open-weight model ever released by a non-Chinese company. The model is available for download, on-premises deployment, or via API, giving Western companies a sovereign alternative to Chinese AI. While Trinity does not outperform closed models from OpenAI or Anthropic, it avoids their unpredictability. Arcee uses the permissive Apache 2.0 license and has gained traction as a top model used with the popular open source AI agent tool OpenClaw, after Anthropic restricted its own users from that platform.