we're on an Open Model mission to help builders create world class agents >20x cheaper than what they have today a couple things have become…

we're on an Open Model mission to help builders create world class agents >20x cheaper than what they have today a couple things have become evident recently: 1. The age of the token subsidy is being pulled back 2. Open Models have crossed an intelligence threshold making them viable for real world agents at a fraction of the cost As teams get exponentially larger monthly bills from the labs, it's worth exploring how many agents today perform just as well using Open Models Check out the numbers on external evals + try it yourself by dogfooding and running on internal evals - @OpenRouter and @ArtificialAnlys have great leaderboards and breakdowns of what people are using. The time investment is definitely worth the massive cost savings - Instead of Sonnet 4.6 (or even 5.5/Opus) try Kimi-2.6, GLM5.1, Deepseek v4 pro, etc - Instead of Haiku try DeepSeekv4 Flash, Nemotron, etc Open models require some tuning to make sure they work well in your harness for your task (another reason why open harnesses are important) The closed models are excellent, there's no need to full-scale rip them out. Often the first use of Open Models is as subagents or using a closed frontier model as an Advisor to an open driver model At LangChain we want to make it as easy as possible to build the best agents in the world as cheaply and quickly as possible. We're leaning into open models heavily across our products and libraries try out an open model in deepagents in just a couple lines and come ride the open model, open harness future

Source: Harrison Chase (X) | 2026-05-04