Ricursive Intelligence’s Ripple-65B Preview claims coding lead among US open models

The chip-design startup's first open-weight model edges past a far larger rival on TerminalBench 2.1 and posts 79.1 on SWE-bench Pro v2.0 Hard Ricursive Intelligence has released Ripple-65B Preview, an open-weight model that the company says leads all US open models on two demanding coding benchmarks. The startup is best known for using AI to design chips. Now it is shipping a general-purpose coding model, and it is putting up numbers against models many times its size. The release landed on November 4, 2026, under an Apache 2.0 license. That is about as permissive as licenses get: developers can download it, modify it, and use it commercially without asking anyone’s permission. The benchmark numbers Ripple-65B Preview scored 80.52 on TerminalBench 2.1, which measures how well a model writes and executes code inside a terminal environment. That score puts it ahead of Reflection Beam 501B, which sits at 80.1. The margin is less than half a point. The more interesting detail is size. Ripple has 65 billion parameters, while its closest rival carries 501 billion. The second benchmark is SWE-bench Pro v2.0 Hard, which covers difficult software engineering tasks. Ripple scored 79.1 there...