By Emily Forlini
Publication Date: 2026-10-05 19:00:00
The U.S. has a new horse in the race to build the best open-source AI model, a competition China is currently dominating, with popular models such as Kimi K3 from Moonshot and DeepSeek’s V4.
Reflection, a New York City–based AI company, today unveiled its first model, called Beam. It “advances the frontier for the Western open ecosystem,” the company told Fortune. The company said that in benchmark tests it conducted Beam achieved scores similar to those of GLM-5.2, an open model from Beijing-based Z.ai that was released back in July. That model was succeeded by GLM-5.3, which Z.ai debuted in August.
Reflection said Beam is cheaper to run than many competing models. “Through high-compute reinforcement learning, we were able to make Beam extremely efficient at reasoning—delivering competitive performance on coding and agentic tasks at a fraction of the token cost and inference time compute,” the company said. Reflection added that Beam is three to four times as efficient as rival open models from Western companies.
It is positioning Beam as a “workhorse” for enterprises, the public sector, and developers. In May, the company entered into a partnership to supply its models to the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of War.
The company also signed a $6.3 billion compute deal with SpaceX in June for access to Nvidia GB300 chips at its Colossus 2 data center, CNBC reported. It added another $1 billion compute deal in July via cloud…
