Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines drops a 975B open-weights AI model as US-Iran clashes escalate over Hormuz

The AI frontier just got a major new open player. On Wednesday, Thinking Machines Lab — founded earlier this year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati — released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weights model that the company says is the largest American open model to date and competitive with Chinese frontier models like DeepSeek V4 and Kimi K2.6 ^[1]. Released under an Apache 2.0 license, Inkling supports a one-million-token context window, runs as a mixture-of-experts model with about 41 billion active parameters per token, and was trained from scratch on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video using Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems ^[1]. The model is available through Thinking Machines’ Tinker platform and for download on Hugging Face, with third-party API access planned through TogetherAI, Fireworks, Databricks, and others ^[1].

Inkling arrives as the open-weights debate intensifies. While Chinese labs have released several large open models, American frontier players have mostly kept their weights proprietary. Thinking Machines is betting that permissive licensing and developer customization — including the ability to write its own fine-tuning scripts — can carve out a distinct position against both closed U.S. models and open Chinese alternatives ^[1].

Meanwhile, the world is watching the Persian Gulf. The U.S. and Iran have exchanged strikes for a sixth consecutive day, and the interim ceasefire reached last month has effectively collapsed ^[2][3]. Tehran launched missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases and allies in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, while Washington hit Iranian command centers, air-defense sites, and coastal surveillance facilities including the port city of Bandar Abbas and Greater Tunb Island ^[2][3]. Iranian officials say U.S. strikes have killed more than 35 people and wounded over 300 ^[3].

The flashpoint is the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil shipments normally pass. Iran has effectively closed the waterway, and the U.S. has reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports ^[2][3]. Brent crude has climbed above $85 a barrel, more than 15 percent above pre-war levels, as tanker traffic stalls and shippers either idle or transit with location transponders off ^[3]. President Donald Trump has threatened to hit Iranian energy infrastructure, bridges, and power plants if Tehran does not return to talks, while Iran’s military has called the strait an “invincible red line” ^[2][3].

Amid the hostilities, a small diplomatic signal: Iran released Dena Karari, a U.S.-Iranian citizen detained since 2024, and Trump publicly thanked Tehran for the “gesture of Goodwill” ^[2]. Whether that opens a path back to negotiations — or merely punctuates another week of escalation — remains an open question.