LongCat-2.0 (Meituan) logo
B

LongCat-2.0 (Meituan)

B Tier · 7.9/10

Meituan's open-source 1.6T-parameter MoE (~48B active) with native 1M-token context, MIT license -- trained entirely on domestic Chinese AI ASICs and revealed as the stealth 'Owl Alpha' model that had been topping OpenRouter

Last updated: 2026-07-05Free tier available

Score Breakdown

6.0
Ease of Use
8.5
Output Quality
9.0
Value
8.0
Features

Benchmark Scores

Benchmarks for LongCat-2.0 (self-reported, third-party verification pending)

BenchmarkScore
SWE-bench Pro59.5%
Terminal-Bench 2.170.8%
SWE-bench Multilingual77.3%

Last updated: 2026-07-05

The Good and the Bad

What we like

  • +Genuinely open frontier scale: 1.6T total / ~48B active per token under MIT -- the largest permissively-licensed model released to date
  • +Native long context: LongCat Sparse Attention trained on hundreds of billions of tokens of 1M-context data, not a post-hoc context extension
  • +Self-reported coding results in frontier territory: SWE-bench Pro 59.5 (above GPT-5.5's 58.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro's 54.2 on the same table), Terminal-Bench 2.1 70.8
  • +Proof that the domestic-Chinese-silicon stack works at frontier scale: full 35T+-token pretraining run and deployment on AI ASIC superpods with, per Meituan, no rollbacks or irrecoverable loss spikes

What could be better

  • 1.6T total parameters puts self-hosting out of reach for everyone but datacenter operators -- 'open weights' here means auditable and API-competitive, not local
  • Benchmark numbers are self-published by Meituan; independent verification (Artificial Analysis etc.) still pending, and its own table shows Claude Opus 4.8 well ahead (SWE-bench Pro 69.2, Terminal-Bench 78.9)
  • Meituan is a food-delivery giant, not a dedicated AI lab -- long-term model-line commitment and Western enterprise support are unproven
  • US/EU enterprises may face procurement friction on a Chinese-trained model regardless of the MIT license

Pricing

Self-hosted (open weights)

$0
  • MIT license -- commercial use permitted
  • Weights on Hugging Face (meituan-longcat/LongCat-2.0)
  • 1.6T total params -- datacenter-scale deployment only

API

$0.75 / $2.95/per 1M tokens in/out
  • Pricing as reported by VentureBeat at launch -- verify on vendor platform before building
  • Also available via OpenRouter (previously as stealth 'Owl Alpha')

System Requirements

Hardware needed to self-host. Min = smallest viable setup (usually heavy quantization). Max = full-precision / production-grade.

Model variantMinMax
LongCat-2.0 (1.6T MoE, ~48B active)Not practical to self-host below datacenter scale -- consume via API or OpenRouter instead.Datacenter multi-node GPU/ASIC clusterASIC superpod (Meituan's own deployment)

Known Issues

  • LAUNCH (2026-06-30): Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0 -- 1.6T-parameter MoE (~48B activated per token), MIT license, native 1M-token context via LongCat Sparse Attention. Trained on 35T+ tokens entirely on domestic Chinese AI ASIC 'superpods' (no Nvidia), which is the geopolitical headline. Revealed as the stealth 'Owl Alpha' model that had been leading OpenRouter rankings. Self-reported benchmarks: SWE-bench Pro 59.5, Terminal-Bench 2.1 70.8, SWE-bench Multilingual 77.3. API pricing per VentureBeat: $0.75/$2.95 per 1M tokens in/out. Weights verified live on Hugging Face (safetensors present) as of 2026-07-05Source: Hugging Face model card (huggingface.co/meituan-longcat/LongCat-2.0), VentureBeat, SiliconANGLE (2026-06-30) · 2026-06-30

Best for

Teams that want frontier-class open weights for audit, fine-tuning research, or API use at aggressive pricing -- especially agentic-coding workloads where its SWE-bench Pro showing and 1M context matter.

Not for

Anyone hoping to run it locally (1.6T params is datacenter-only), or enterprises that need vendor-grade support and independently verified benchmarks before adopting.

Our Verdict

LongCat-2.0 is the most consequential open-weights release since GLM-5.2 -- not because it beats the closed frontier (Meituan's own table shows Opus 4.8 comfortably ahead) but because of what it represents: a 1.6T-parameter MIT-licensed model trained end-to-end on Chinese ASICs, from a company best known for food delivery, quietly topping OpenRouter under a pseudonym before launch. If you consume models by API, the reported $0.75/$2.95 pricing makes it worth benchmarking against your current stack. If you're tracking the open-vs-closed race, this is the data point that says frontier-scale training no longer requires Nvidia -- or a US lab.

Sources

  • Hugging Face: meituan-longcat/LongCat-2.0 model card (accessed 2026-07-05)
  • VentureBeat: Meituan open-sources LongCat-2.0 (accessed 2026-07-05)
  • SiliconANGLE: Meituan open-sources massive LongCat-2.0 (accessed 2026-07-05)

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