Reflection AI releases Beam, its first open-weight model

Reflection AI has released Beam, its first public model, after two years and nearly $5 billion in funding. The U.S.based startup says the openweight system is built for coding and agent tasks and is designed to be more efficient than some Chinese competitors. According to the company, Beam uses less compute than Z.ai’s GLM5.2 while reaching comparable results on reasoning and coding benchmarks. Reflection also says the model will be released under an Apache 2.0 license later this month, allowing organizations to customize and run it on their own infrastructure. The launch comes as U.S. developers compete with Chinese labs that have been more active in openmodel releases. Reflection is positioning Beam as part of a longerterm strategy around private, companyrun AI systems.