Thinking Machines Offers Free Inkling Models on OpenRouter to Gather Agent Data

Thinking Machines is offering its Inkling and Inkling-Small models free on OpenRouter for several weeks, restricted to agentic harness usage, in exchange for real-world agent interaction data that will be decoupled from user accounts and used to improve the models.

Confirmed

• The free offering lasts several weeks and is limited to agent harness calls on OpenRouter
• The company explicitly collects behavioral data in real-world agent scenarios, decoupled from accounts
• Multiple accounts including @brhydon, @clarejtbirch and @tessybarton relayed the same announcement
• Per @soumithchintala, both models are open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts (MoE) models
• @NathanpmYoung framed the move as a new industry paradigm: free usage in exchange for training data

Why it matters

• It represents a 'free-for-data' strategy: users get free access within a limited harness while the lab gains real agent interaction data
• Data decoupling from accounts is the privacy safeguard emphasized by the company
• Harness-restricted free access may become a new playbook for labs seeking targeted agent data

2026-08-22 ~ 2026-08-22 · 7 related posts

• [source] Inkling Model Free on OpenRouter to Improve Agentic Performance — thinkymachines · 2026-08-22
• [source] Inkling Model Available for Free on OpenRouter to Improve Agentic Performance — thinkymachines · 2026-08-22
• Thinking Machines Launches Inkling Multimodal MoE Models on OpenRouter — soumithchintala · 2026-08-22
• Inkling Goes Free on OpenRouter to Harvest Real-World Agent Data — clarejtbirch · 2026-08-22
• New Meta: Labs Trading Free Usage for Training Data — NathanpmYoung · 2026-08-22

2 near-duplicate retellings: brhydon · tessybarton