Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Carbon-X vs Granite 4.2 30B
Carbon-X and Granite 4.2 30B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Granite 4.2 30B leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 4969 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Carbon-X C
Best for Agents that need a second opinion on DNA variants and regulatory regions on a 16 to 24 GB machine, without sending sequences to a hosted model.
Ahead on
- Risk, 65 against 55
Watch for
Not clinically validated and no wet-lab validation reported
Best for Agents that want a documented, signed, Apache 2.0 reasoning model with tool calling on a 24 GB card
Ahead on
- Agent interface, 85 against 35
- Documentation and upkeep, 87 against 72
Watch for
No safety results published for it
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Agent interface Granite 4.2 30B +50
Carbon-X 35
Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 10, only the inherited template shows the format and no parser is named. Trained tool calling 0, nothing says it was trained to call tools. Structured output 0, not documented. Reasoning control 0, thinking can be switched off but was never trained, and the card asks you to keep it off. Context 5, 40,960 tokens from the base, though Hugging Face trained at 8,192 and under 16K. Most of what the card documents for agents is Carbon-X as a tool another model calls, which this checklist doesn't read.
Granite 4.2 30B 85
Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository, with roles, tools, tool responses, the thinking switch and low effort. Tool-calling format 25, the card has tool-calling sections for vLLM and SGLang, declares tools with OpenAI's function schema and names the parser to use, qwen3_coder, which both runtimes ship in the released versions read. Trained tool calling 20, the template loops over every entry in an assistant turn's tool_calls, so it renders several calls in one turn, and the card names tool calling and agentic workflows as what it's best for. Structured output 0, the card doesn't document JSON or JSON Schema output or how to ask for it. Reasoning control 10, the card documents thinking on by default, non-thinking and low-effort modes per request through the template (enable_thinking and low_effort), with the reasoning returned apart from the answer. Context 10, 131,072 tokens natively per the card and config.json. 20 + 25 + 20 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 85.
Documentation and upkeep Granite 4.2 30B +15
Carbon-X 72
Model card 17, everything but a knowledge cut-off. Training data 15, the mid-training sources and shares are listed, the instruction and fine-tuning data aren't named, and there's no cut-off. Last change 20, 28 October 2026, when config.json, generation_config.json, tokenizer_config.json and tokenizer.py were fixed. Responsiveness 10, organisation members replied to 2 of the 4 questions so far. Version policy 5, a first release whose history was squashed without a note. File health 5, the card now sends llama.cpp users to the publisher's GGUF repository, but the tokenizer config's 131,072 still contradicts the card's 40,960. 17 + 15 + 20 + 10 + 5 + 5 = 72.
Granite 4.2 30B 87
Model card 17, Intended use (best for), limitations (ethical considerations and limitations), architecture, parameters (30B), context length (128K native) and 12 tested languages are on the card. Training data 20, IBM's disclosure file for the 30B lists the datasets used in pre-training and post-training as machine-readable metadata, and the card describes the three training stages. Last change 15, the last commit to the repository was on 4 September 2026, 67 days before this check. Responsiveness 20, Of the 4 discussions that aren't pull requests (28 August to 3 November 2026), 3 have a reply from an ibm-granite member. Version policy 5, Granite 4.1 30B stays in its own repository and 4.2 came out in new ones. File health 10, Config, template and card agree on the architecture, the 131,072-token context and the thinking switch. 17 + 20 + 15 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 87.
Risk Carbon-X +10
Carbon-X 65
File safety 15, safetensors and GGUF only, but the documented loading path runs the repository's tokenizer.py through trust_remote_code. Provenance 15, the files are in HuggingFaceBio, which Hugging Face's GitHub repository links, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 10, Hugging Face reports its own dual-use check on sequence editing in the launch post, without numbers or a harness. Agent guidance 5, general cautions only. Licence risk 15, plain Apache 2.0. Security programme 5, Hugging Face's security.txt is a reporting route, and public advisories couldn't be checked.
Granite 4.2 30B 55
File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, the files sit in the ibm-granite organisation, which IBM's Granite docs and the GitHub README link to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions. Licence risk 15, Apache 2.0 has no use policy, field-of-use limit, threshold or change clause, and the card's licence link resolves. Security programme 5, www.ibm.com/.well-known/security.txt names IBM PSIRT, read for the 3B listing on 4 November 2026 (5). 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 5 = 55.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Carbon-X | Granite 4.2 30B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 90 | 90 | even |
| Risk | 20%20 | 65 | 55 | Carbon-X +10 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 35 | 85 | Granite 4.2 30B +50 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 72 | 87 | Granite 4.2 30B +15 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Carbon-X | Granite 4.2 30B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | Hugging Face (HuggingFaceBio) | IBM |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-28 | 2026-09-04 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (4) | none |
How the scores have moved
Granite 4.2 30B
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
Carbon-X
A DNA specialist cousin that another agent calls for variant-effect and sequence questions, with DNA kept on the machine. Hugging Face's Q4_K_M GGUF needs about 12 GB and Q8_0 about 19 GB, on llama.cpp b11742 or later. It isn't clinically validated, isn't trained for tool calls or reasoning, and its Python tokenizer runs repository code.
Granite 4.2 30B
IBM's largest reasoning cousin, with the same strengths as the 3B. It runs in every runtime we count from IBM's own builds on a 24 GB card, is signed, plain Apache 2.0, and comes with a disclosure of its training data. No safety results are published and structured output isn't documented.
Before you call either
Carbon-X
- Quickest start is
llama-server -hf HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X-GGUF:Q8_0 -ngl 99 -c 40960 --jinja --chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": false}' --temp 0.6 --top-p 0.95 --top-k 20 --min-p 0, on llama.cpp b11742 or later - With vLLM or Transformers pass trust_remote_code, and expect the tokenizer to fetch Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Base at a pinned revision on first load
- Keep enable_thinking false and the card's sampling (temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95, top_k 20), the settings every reported result used
- Keep DNA in files and pass sequences by name, compute positions and base changes in code and send them as context, the card says the model miscounts long sequences
- Only A, C, G and T form 6-mers, so filter N and other IUPAC codes first or they become a single oov token
- Strip the dna tags from answers if you need bare sequence, llama.cpp keeps them in the text
- Cap max_tokens for next-base questions, long DNA generation is slow and degrades
Granite 4.2 30B
- Start it with
ollama run granite4.2:30b, orllama-server -hf ibm-granite/granite-4.2-30b-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja - With vLLM 0.32.0 or later leave out
--reasoning-parser-plugin, since the parser is built in, and use--tool-call-parser qwen3_coder - Thinking is on by default. Pass
enable_thinkingfalse to turn it off orlow_efforttrue for short reasoning - The context is 131,072 tokens. The card's 512K extension isn't documented
- Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented
- IBM recommends Granite Guardian beside it to flag risky inputs and outputs
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Carbon-X or Granite 4.2 30B?
Carbon-X and Granite 4.2 30B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61 (C) and 61 (C). Granite 4.2 30B leads on agent interface and documentation and upkeep.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/carbon-x-vs-granite-4-2-30b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/carbon-x.json·/api/v1/tools/granite-4-2-30b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare carbon-x granite-4-2-30b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "carbon-x", "b": "granite-4-2-30b"}at/mcp, no key