Inkling vs. Claude Opus 5.5

Inkling is an open-weights multimodal AI model from Thinking Machines built to support customization, agentic workflows, coding, reasoning, vision, audio, and enterprise AI use cases. The model is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, 256 routed experts per MoE layer, and six routed experts active per token. It supports context windows up to 1 million tokens and was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens across text, images, audio, and video. Inkling is designed as a broad foundation model rather than a narrowly optimized benchmark model, giving it balanced capabilities across reasoning, coding, factuality, instruction following, vision, audio, tool use, and safety. Its controllable thinking effort lets developers adjust how much computation and generated reasoning the model uses, helping teams balance quality, latency, and cost for different production needs. The model can run agentic coding tasks, use tools, create web apps, generate polished multi-page artifacts, reason over long contexts, and work through iterative refinement loops. For multimodal tasks, Inkling can process images, answer questions about visual content, transcribe and reason over audio, follow spoken instructions, and combine visual reasoning with code-based tools such as Python. Thinking Machines trained Inkling for calibration, instruction following, factual reliability, refusal behavior, and safety across multiple modalities, including evaluations for dangerous capabilities and human-AI threat vectors. Inkling is available on Tinker for fine-tuning, with 64K and 256K context options, an Inkling Playground for testing, cookbook recipes, and support for multimodal post-training workflows. Its full weights are available on Hugging Face, and deployment support is available through APIs and infrastructure partners such as TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, Baseten, SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and transformers.

Claude Opus 5.5 is Anthropic’s high-capability AI model for advanced coding, research, business work, computer use, and extended agentic tasks. It is designed to operate effectively on large and complex workloads that require planning, sustained context, tool use, verification, and multiple execution steps. In software engineering, Opus 5.5 can be used for codebase-wide migrations, debugging, audits, optimization, code review, and other long-running development projects. The model also supports knowledge-intensive work such as financial analysis, legal research, spreadsheet creation, executive presentations, data collection, and professional reporting. Anthropic reports that Opus 5.5 improves both task efficiency and serving efficiency compared with Opus 5, including lower token usage, faster output, and reduced cost on typical workloads. Its writing and communication behavior has been updated to prioritize important information, reduce unclear phrasing, and better follow requested style constraints. Opus 5.5 also includes stronger safeguards for autonomous and tool-using scenarios, including action screening, improved prompt-injection resistance, sandbox support, and vulnerability detection during code review. Anthropic applies additional safeguards to cybersecurity, biology, and model-distillation use cases, with expanded access programs available to verified organizations in certain sensitive fields. The model supports zero data retention and includes watermarking measures intended to support compliance requirements such as the EU AI Act. Developers can access Opus 5.5 through the Claude Platform using the claude-opus-5-5 model, while Claude Code and other Anthropic products can use it for interactive and agentic work. Claude Opus 5.5 is also available through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure for organizations that prefer to deploy through major cloud platforms.