# Inkling 2 Small vs Beam 1.0 (slim)

> Beam 1.0 scores 53.4 (D) to Inkling 2 Small's 52.1 (D) for llm inference. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/inkling-2-small-vs-reflection-beam.md (~6,500 tokens) · this version ~3,330 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/inkling-2-small-vs-reflection-beam.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/inkling-2-small-vs-reflection-beam
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-06
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Beam 1.0 scores 53.4 (D) on agent readiness against Inkling 2 Small's 52.1 (D), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Inkling 2 Small leads on security & auth, payments & pricing, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do llm inference.

- Inkling 2 Small: D 52.1, rank #899 of 1354 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/inkling-2-small.min.md
- Beam 1.0: D 53.4, rank #850 of 1354 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/reflection-beam.min.md
- Inkling 2 Small, good for Developers who want a capable multimodal open-family model through an OpenAI-compatible API today, or to fine-tune it on Tinker, and who can live with a beta surface until the weights are published. Ahead on Security & auth, 57 against 45; Payments & pricing, 20 against 10; Maintenance & community, 75 against 50; Transparency & trust, 64 against 57.
- Beam 1.0, good for An OpenAI-compatible endpoint for a large open-weight coding and agent model, for builders who want the same model hosted or self-hosted under Apache-2.0. Ahead on Reliability, 52 against 30; Schema & documentation, 84 against 70; Agent ergonomics, 67 against 62.

| Category | Inkling 2 Small | Beam 1.0 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 30 | 52 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 70 | 84 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 62 | 67 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 57 | 45 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 20 | 10 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 75 | 50 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 64 | 57 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Inkling 2 Small | Beam 1.0 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Thinking Machines Lab | Reflection |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://tinker.thinkingmachines.dev/services/tinker-prod/oai/api/v1` | `https://api.reflection.ai/openai/v1` |
| Transports |  | HTTP |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| Licence | Proprietary for now, used through Tinker under the Tinker Terms of Use and Thinking Machines' Model Acceptable Use Policy, per the model card. Thinking Machines says it will publish the weights under Apache 2.0 the week after launch, once outside safety testing is done | Weights under Apache-2.0. The hosted Reflection API is a closed service under Reflection's commercial terms of service |
| Last release | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-16 |
| Terms last updated | not read yet | 2026-10-05 |
| Privacy policy last updated | not read yet | 2026-08-28 |
| Customer content may train models | not read yet | yes |
| Terms restrict automated access | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not read yet | yes |
| Agent reviews | none | 2.5/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Maintenance & community, Inkling 2 Small +25: Inkling 2 Small 75 (Model reading. Released 5 November 2026 (30). Churn and notice in place of release counts: Inkling, Inkling-Small (30 July) and Inkling 2 Small in about four months, and a deprecations page with dated retirements and a promise to 'aim to give advance notice' by email, with no stated period, per the tinker listing (10 of 20). A public changelog and a support address and Discord, per the tinker listing (10 of 15). Current official SDKs, Tinker's Python SDK and the OpenAI-compatible endpoint (15). SDK and cookbook CI, per the tinker listing (10). 30 + 10 + 10 + 15 + 10 = 75.); Beam 1.0 50 (Model reading. The weights were published on 16 October 2026, the date on the Hugging Face model page (the repository was created on 7 October); later commits to 30 October add evaluation results and a guide, which record no model change (30). One model, with a `shutdown_date` field and a lifecycle section in the docs but no notice period for retirements, and no history of releases or retirements yet (4 of 20). No changelog. Support through the platform and developers@reflection.ai for higher limits, and the model card names reports@reflection.ai. The Hub page shows 15 discussions (10 open, 5 closed), replies not sampled (6 of 25). No first-party SDK, the docs rely on the OpenAI SDKs (5 of 15). Reflection's serving guides for vLLM, SGLang, TokenSpeed, Transformers and Dynamo, a Beam Verifier repository, and fine-tuning recipes now published for NeMo AutoModel, Megatron Bridge, Axolotl and TRL (5 of 10, partial kept). 30 + 4 + 6 + 5 + 5 = 50.)
- Reliability, Beam 1.0 +22: Inkling 2 Small 30 (Model reading, for the surface it's called on, Tinker's serverless inference and OpenAI-compatible API. No status page found, per the tinker listing's checks of 1 October and 4 November (0), so no readable incident history (5). The only published limit is the in-flight sample cap of 2,000, per the tinker listing's 1 October check; the OpenAI-compatible page gives no numbers and says higher or more stable throughput needs the waitlist (10). The SDK retries sampling with stable request IDs, per the tinker listing's reading of the SDK repository; the OpenAI-compatible page has no retry guidance (15). No SLA found (0). Serverless inference is 'currently in beta' on the models and pricing page and the OpenAI-compatible API is labelled Beta, read 6 November (0). 0 + 5 + 10 + 15 + 0 + 0 = 30.); Beam 1.0 52 (Hosted lines, for the Reflection API. Status page at status.reflection.ai on incident.io, with API, platform and developer docs components and Atom and RSS feeds (20). In the 90 days to 4 November 2026 its incident pages list two full outages of the API component, a serving cluster down from 22:01 to 23:20 UTC on 14 October and elevated errors from 06:10 to 07:10 UTC on 15 October, each an hour or more, so two majors. Three more are labelled partial outages (16 October 02:28 to 02:38 UTC, 22 October rate-limit errors in two windows, 3 November about 20:10 to 21:38 UTC on one inference provider), read as minor. Two majors give 5. Rate limits are described per organisation in requests and tokens per minute and per day, with concurrency caps and headers, but no figures are published (5 of 15). 429 and 503 responses carry `Retry-After`, daily limits add `x-should-retry: false`, and the errors page says which codes to retry, with exponential backoff and jitter. There are no idempotency keys, and a chat completion is the billed call, so this run's value for retry guidance without idempotency keys gives 12 (was 15). No SLA found (0). The developers docs read on 4 November carry no beta or preview label for the API; the earlier beta reading came from reflection.ai pages now struck (10). 20 + 5 + 5 + 12 + 0 + 10 = 52.)
- Schema & documentation, Beam 1.0 +14: Inkling 2 Small 70 (Model reading. No OpenAPI file of its own; the OpenAI-compatible chat and completions endpoints and the typed Python SDK are the contract, as the tinker listing reads it (15). llms.txt on the docs host, per the tinker listing's 1 October check (10). The model card states intended use (agentic and tool-use systems, coding assistants, chatbots, RAG), inputs, outputs and limitations, and the launch post its benchmarks (16 of 20). Model IDs, context lengths and the reasoning_effort values (none to xhigh, or 0.0 to 0.99) are documented; the tool-call format and structured output aren't, for this model (8 of 15). A Python example and an HTTP 400 for models without reasoning_effort, with no error page (6 of 15). A dated Tinker changelog and a model deprecations page, per the tinker listing (15). 15 + 10 + 16 + 8 + 6 + 15 = 70.); Beam 1.0 84 (Model reading. OpenAPI 3.0.3 document, version 0.1.0, covering all three documented endpoints with typed schemas and error examples. A second 'Reflection client' base URL, https://api.reflection.ai/v1, is named with no endpoints documented (22 of 25). llms.txt, a Markdown copy of every page and a docs MCP endpoint (10). The guides say which reasoning effort suits which task, which OpenAI parameters are fixed, ignored or unsupported and which endpoints don't exist, so a model knows what not to send (17 of 20). `reasoning_effort` is an enum, strict JSON Schema for tools and `json_schema` output with the unsupported keywords and size limits listed, and unknown parameters return `unsupported_parameter` (15). curl, Python and TypeScript examples on every guide, and an error reference with every status, `error.code` and retry advice (15). The model ID carries its version and the models endpoint has a `shutdown_date` field, but no changelog or release notes were found (5 of 15). 22 + 10 + 17 + 15 + 15 + 5 = 84. The OpenAPI file is linked from llms.txt; the guides beyond the overview, models, rate limits, authentication and reference overview pages are per the 17 October check.)
- Security & auth, Inkling 2 Small +12: Inkling 2 Small 57 (Platform readings are the tinker listing's. Revocable API keys from the console, with no per-key scopes found (20). Org, team and project permissions with no read-only role (5). The model returns its own completions, no third-party content (10). get_audit_log() for admins (15). security.txt with a reporting address and no stated acknowledgement time (7). For the model reading, Tinker's terms commit not to use Customer Content for training, recorded under transparency. 20 + 5 + 10 + 15 + 7 = 57.); Beam 1.0 45 (Model reading. API keys per project, revocable, shown once and disabled when their creator leaves, with no scopes, expiry or rotation API found (20 of 30). Training 10 of 20, partial kept. The API reference says each response's `reflection-data-retention` header reports `contributor` when content may be used to train Reflection's models "under contributor terms your organization accepted". The API safety page and commercial terms read on 17 October are struck (reflection.ai now disallows our crawler), so whether training is off by default can't be read. Retention 5 of 15, partial kept. The header can report `zero`, `standard` or `contributor`, and no readable page states periods or whether zero retention is offered. `x-request-id` on every response and the retention header, with usage dashboards behind the login and not read (5 of 15). Security programme 5 of 20 (was 6). The model card names reports@reflection.ai for security vulnerabilities; developers.reflection.ai has no security.txt (404 on 17 October), and the safety report and reflection.ai's security.txt can't be read. No bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001 found on a readable page. 20 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 45.)
- Payments & pricing, Inkling 2 Small +10: Inkling 2 Small 20 (Published rubric. No payment protocol (0). Per-million-token prices for serverless inference and training published without a login on 6 November (20). No free tier listed, and the quickstart asks for payment details before training, per the tinker listing (0). Sign-up is a browser flow (0). 0 + 20 + 0 + 0 = 20.); Beam 1.0 10 (Graded on the Reflection API. No x402, MPP or L402 (0). No per-token, plan or allocation price is published on any readable page; the beta pricing page on reflection.ai is struck (0, was 10). Free tier 10 of 20, partial kept. The rate-limits page describes a daily token allowance and asks those requesting higher limits whether they are "interested in paid usage", and the authentication page says some organisations must verify a credit card before keys work. A person signs up in the browser at platform.reflection.ai to get a key (0). 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 10.)
- Transparency & trust, Inkling 2 Small +7: Inkling 2 Small 64 (Editorial half. Closed for now under the Tinker Terms of Use and the Model Acceptable Use Policy, per the model card, with Apache 2.0 weights promised the week after launch (15). Terms commit not to use Customer Content for training, keep it only as needed, with a DPA and deletion on request; the privacy notice wasn't re-read, per the tinker listing (15). Dated deprecation notices with no stated period (15). The DPA annex names Google Cloud, Cloudflare, WorkOS and OpenAI with service and location (15). 15 + 15 + 15 + 15 = 60.); Beam 1.0 57 (Weights under Apache-2.0, an OSI licence, per the model card, which says the licence doesn't restrict distillation or training on outputs. The hosted API is a closed service whose commercial terms are on reflection.ai and can no longer be read (25 of 30, kept). Data handling 10 of 30, partial kept. What remains readable is the API reference's retention header (`zero`, `standard`, `contributor`) and the rate-limits page's request for data retention requirements; the terms, privacy policy, API safety page and zero-retention page are struck. Deprecation 4 of 20 (was 6). A `shutdown_date` field and a lifecycle section that says to move off a model before that date, with no notice period or dated notice; the fee-increase notice came from the struck terms. Subprocessors 0 of 20 (was 18). The list read on 17 October is on reflection.ai and struck, and no readable page names subprocessors or data locations. 25 + 10 + 4 + 0 = 39.)