IBM drops open-weight Granite 4.2 family with built-in agentic capabilities under Apache 2.0

IBM has released its Granite 4.2 language models in 3B, 8B, and 30B sizes. Trained from scratch on about 15 trillion tokens, the models support context windows up to 512,000 tokens and can toggle between "thinking" and "non-thinking" modes to control compute per task, according to IBM. A "low-effort" mode saves resources on simple queries. The 8B and 30B variants also go through what IBM calls "agentic RL" training, where they learn to use tools, write and run code, and search the web in real sandbox environments. All models support OpenAI-format tool calling and run on vLLM or SGLang.

The new Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC models have just 470 million parameters and are twice as fast as the previous leaders on the Open ASR Leaderboard, IBM says. They can transcribe three hours of audio in one second. All models are available under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, Ollama, GitHub, and other platforms.

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