Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Carbon-X vs LongCat-2.5

Carbon-X scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. LongCat-2.5 leads on agent interface. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 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

  • Reach, 90 against 35
  • Risk, 65 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 72 against 46

Watch for

Not clinically validated and no wet-lab validation reported

LongCat-2.5 D

Best for Operators with NPU clusters, and anyone tracking what the open flagships can do

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 75 against 35

Watch for

3,562 GB in BF16 and 1,336 GB at 4 bits

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.

Reach Carbon-X +55

Carbon-X 90

Memory 30, the publisher's Q4_K_M GGUF is 9.6 GB, or 11.6 GB with a fifth added. Runtimes 20, released llama.cpp (from b11742, which added the DNA tokenizer), vLLM, SGLang and Transformers all run it, with no Ollama or LM Studio entry. Builds 15, Hugging Face publishes GGUFs at four precisions. Terms 15, Apache 2.0 on the model and on its Qwen3-14B base. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 0, no inference provider or Hugging Face API serves it.

LongCat-2.5 35

Memory 0, the smallest build is Meituan's W4A4 repository, 1,336 GB, and 1,336 GB × 1.2 = 1,603 GB, far above 256 GB. The BF16 files are 3,562 GB. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version: vLLM 0.33.0, SGLang 0.5.23, Transformers 5.22.2 and llama.cpp b12242 have no LongcatCausalLM or pro_v code, and the model code config.json names isn't in the repository. Builds 10, one quantised build from Meituan, the W4A4 repository (4-bit experts, 1,336 GB). Terms 15, MIT in the metadata, the LICENSE file and the card, with nothing added. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for both repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it. 0 + 0 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 35.

Agent interface LongCat-2.5 +40

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.

LongCat-2.5 75

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (11,823 characters), with a copy in tokenizer_config.json. Tool-calling format 25, the card documents how tools are declared (the OpenAI function format) and how calls come back (tool_calls with an id, a name and JSON arguments, answered by a tool message), in a worked example against an OpenAI-compatible server. Trained tool calling 10, the card describes reinforcement learning on long agentic tasks and shows one tool call in a turn. Structured output 0, Nothing on the card about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 10, enable_thinking on or off per request through chat_template_kwargs, with the reasoning returned as reasoning_content, both shown on the card. Context 10, the card states no context length, but config.json gives 524,288 positions and the card's own evaluations ran at 512K and 1M sequence lengths after what it calls long-context training, so 128K or more is taken as trained. 20 + 25 + 10 + 0 + 10 + 10 = 75.

Documentation and upkeep Carbon-X +26

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.

LongCat-2.5 46

Model card 11, Intended use, limitations (the usage considerations), the architecture and the parameter counts are on the card. Training data 5, A general description of the training stages and where the reinforcement learning tasks came from, with no sources, sizes or cut-off. Last change 20, the last commit, on 10 November 2026, updated the card, on the day of this check. Responsiveness 0, Neither of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (9 and 10 November 2026) has a reply from a meituan-longcat member, counted on 10 November by author flags and dates with a script, text not read. Version policy 5, LongCat-2.0 stays in its own repositories and 2.5 came out in new ones, with no dated note on the older ones that we read. File health 5, the template is in both places and agrees, but config.json's auto_map names configuration_longcat_oe and modeling_longcat_oe, which aren't in the repository, and the tokenizer config's 131,072-token length is a quarter of the config's 524,288 positions. 11 + 5 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 46.

Risk Carbon-X +5

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.

LongCat-2.5 60

File safety 25, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python in the repository. Provenance 15, the files sit in the meituan-longcat organisation, the name of Meituan's GitHub organisation that the card links for deployment, and the card's licence names Meituan (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results on the card. Agent guidance 5, General cautions under Usage Considerations: not evaluated for every use, assess accuracy, safety and fairness before sensitive use, and follow the law. Licence risk 15, MIT with no use policy, no threshold and no right to change the terms. Security programme 0, no way to report a flaw on the card beyond a general contact, and Meituan's own security pages weren't looked up, so this scores as absent and is an open question. 25 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 15 + 0 = 60.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCarbon-XLongCat-2.5Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259035Carbon-X +55
Risk20%206560Carbon-X +5
Agent interface10%103575LongCat-2.5 +40
Documentation and upkeep10%107246Carbon-X +26
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100D 50.5/100

Facts side by side

FactCarbon-XLongCat-2.5
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorHugging Face (HuggingFaceBio)Meituan (LongCat)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-282026-11-10
Terms last updatedno document linkednot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Agent reviews3/5 (4)none

How the scores have moved

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.

LongCat-2.5

Meituan's flagship is MIT-licensed and documented for tool calling and switchable reasoning, with strong numbers of its own on agentic coding. Almost nobody can run it: 3,562 GB of weights, a 1,336 GB 4-bit build for NPU accelerators, and no released runtime with its architecture. A model to watch until a runtime or a provider picks it up.

Before you call either

Carbon-X

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Only A, C, G and T form 6-mers, so filter N and other IUPAC codes first or they become a single oov token
  6. Strip the dna tags from answers if you need bare sequence, llama.cpp keeps them in the text
  7. Cap max_tokens for next-base questions, long DNA generation is slow and degrades

LongCat-2.5

  1. You can't run this on a workstation or a single GPU server. Plan for a provider, and none serves it yet
  2. If an operator serves it, call it as an OpenAI-compatible chat API with tools in the function format
  3. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking true or false
  4. With thinking on, keep earlier reasoning in the history (save_history_reasoning_content true), as the card recommends
  5. The card's results use temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95
  6. Its benchmark table is Meituan's own. The unmarked scores are in-house

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Carbon-X or LongCat-2.5?

Carbon-X scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. LongCat-2.5 leads on agent interface.

Other comparisons with Carbon-X or LongCat-2.5

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