Clef vs Microsoft-Decision-1

Clef

Apache-2.0 weights for all three models, ungated on Hugging Face. Clef-omni (9 October 2026) adds audio and video input. Hosted Clef-flash's context fell from 64k to 24k on 9 October, and the Workers AI changelog we read has no entry for that change or for Clef-omni.

Microsoft-Decision-1

Microsoft publishes $0.042 per million input tokens, with output free, and the model is callable through Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter. It is in public preview. No licence, model-specific retention statement, rate limit or deprecation policy was found, and the Foundry route needs an Azure deployment and an Entra token. Latency and accuracy figures are Microsoft's claims.

Clef

1. Send model in the body as clef, clef-flash or clef-omni, matching the model in the URL. The input schema requires it
2. Ask every independent question about one state in one call. Up to 64 are allowed
3. Try clef-flash first for text-only triage under 24k tokens. It costs $0.038 per million input tokens against $0.24 for Clef
4. Send Clef-omni audio and video as base64 data URIs in audio and videos. Remote URLs are not accepted
5. Media and questions count towards the context window. If they exceed it, the request fails. Otherwise text state is truncated to fit
6. Read the internal code on a 429. 3036 means the day's 10,000 free neurons are spent, 3040 means capacity, so retry later
7. Treat an answer about user-supplied text, images, audio or video as a judgement that hostile input can steer. Cloudflare publishes no guidance on it

Microsoft-Decision-1

1. Use OpenRouter's Decisions method, not an OpenAI chat-completions SDK. OpenRouter says chat completions SDKs will not work with this model
2. On Foundry, send the request to the deployment's /providers/microsoft/v1/systemone path with a Microsoft Entra token for https://cognitiveservices.azure.com/.default, not an API key
3. Take the deployment name from the Foundry quickstart before the first call. Microsoft says to confirm the route and authentication header, and the pages reviewed do not give the name
4. Keep each request within OpenRouter's 32,768-token context and send only fixed options, since the model is not intended for open-ended generation
5. Measure latency and calibration on your own labelled cases before relying on Microsoft's latency and 'nine times out of 10' statements