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

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 vs LongCat-2.5

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 scores 54.8 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. LongCat-2.5 leads on risk and 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

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 C

Best for Teams with a multi-GPU server that want an MIT-licensed flagship for long agent runs and coding

Ahead on

  • Reach, 60 against 35
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 46

Watch for

574 GB in FP8 with no smaller build from inclusionAI, so no single machine under 690 GB of GPU memory runs it

LongCat-2.5 D

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

Ahead on

  • Risk, 60 against 45
  • Agent interface, 75 against 60

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 Ling-3.1-flash-1019 +25

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 60

Memory 0, inclusionAI's only build is the FP8 release at 573.78 GB, × 1.2 = 688.5 GB, above 256 GB, and no runtime's library has a build. Runtimes 25, Released model code in Transformers 5.22.2 (bailing_hybrid), vLLM 0.33.0 (BailingMoeV3ForCausalLM, with ling3 tool and reasoning parsers), SGLang 0.5.23 (bailing_moe_v3.py, its bailing_hybrid config and MTP module) and llama.cpp b12242 (bailingmoe3), and Ollama, credited through its pinned llama.cpp as on the Ling-3.0-tiny listing: v0.40.16 sets LLAMA_CPP_VERSION to b12177. Builds 10, the release is FP8, the one quantised precision inclusionAI publishes for it. Terms 15, MIT in the card's metadata, with no use policy or other terms added on the card or in the repository. Download 10, the Hub API's model info gives gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and no terms to accept. Hosted 0, the Hub API's provider mapping is empty for this repository on 10 November 2026. 0 + 25 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 60.

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.

Risk LongCat-2.5 +15

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 45

File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25), less 10 because the card's documented vLLM command passes --trust-remote-code, which runs the repository's configuration_bailing_moe_v3.py, since vLLM 0.33.0 registers no bailing_hybrid config of its own. Provenance 15, files in the inclusionAI organisation that inclusion-ai.org links to, per the Ling-3.0-tiny listing (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results for the model on its card or in the training-content summary. Agent guidance 0, the card has nothing on prompt injection, refusals or safeguards, and inclusionAI publishes no guardrail probe for this model as it did for Ling 3.0. Licence risk 15, MIT with no use policy, no field-of-use limits, no threshold and no clause letting inclusionAI change or revoke it. Security programme 0, www.inclusion-ai.org answers 404 for security.txt on 10 November 2026, and the Ling-3.0-tiny listing found no SECURITY.md or disclosure policy in the inclusionAI .github repository. 15 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 45.

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.

Agent interface LongCat-2.5 +15

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 60

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (6,042 characters), which handles tools, the thinking switch and preserved reasoning. Tool-calling format 10, only the template says how tools are declared (JSON in <tools>) and how calls come back (<tool_call>name with <arg_key> and <arg_value> pairs). Trained tool calling 20, the template tells the model it may call one or more functions and loops over every entry in an assistant message's tool_calls, and the card reports gains on agentic benchmarks, AA-Briefcase and AutomationBench-AA among them. Structured output 0, the card doesn't document JSON or JSON Schema output. Reasoning control 0, the card documents turning thinking on or off per request with chat_template_kwargs enable_thinking, and names the ling3 reasoning parser, but doesn't say where the reasoning text comes back. Context 10, 262,144 tokens natively in config.json (max_position_embeddings 262144, rope_scaling null) and per SGLang's cookbook. 20 + 10 + 20 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 60.

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 Ling-3.1-flash-1019 +10

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 56

Model card 11, Intended use (complex reasoning, multi-step tasks and agentic workflows), architecture, parameters (560B total, 25B active) and context (1M claimed) are on the card. Training data 15, the training-content summary the card links names the source categories (Common Crawl and other public datasets, commercially licensed data, the Ant Spider crawler, synthetic data), the size band (over 10 trillion text tokens), data collected up to about July 2026 and the filtering, without listing datasets with sizes. Last change 20, the newest commit, on 4 November 2026, edited the card, six days before this check, and the files went up on 27 October. Responsiveness 0, Neither of the 2 discussions that aren't pull requests (both opened on 27 October 2026) has a reply from an inclusionAI member. Version policy 5, the update went into a repository of its own and Ling-3.1-flash and Ling 3.0 stay in theirs. File health 5, the card states a 1M-token context while config.json gives 262,144 with no rope scaling, and its serve commands name the earlier repository as the model path. 11 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 56.

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.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLing-3.1-flash-1019LongCat-2.5Edge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%256035Ling-3.1-flash-1019 +25
Risk20%204560LongCat-2.5 +15
Agent interface10%106075LongCat-2.5 +15
Documentation and upkeep10%105646Ling-3.1-flash-1019 +10
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.8/100D 50.5/100

Facts side by side

FactLing-3.1-flash-1019LongCat-2.5
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorinclusionAI (Ant Group)Meituan (LongCat)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceMITMIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-11-042026-11-10
Terms last updatedno document linkednot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked

Verdicts

Ling-3.1-flash-1019

inclusionAI's newest flagship, a 560B hybrid mixture of experts under plain MIT that vLLM, SGLang, Transformers and llama.cpp run in released versions. It ships only as 574 GB of FP8, so it needs a multi-GPU server. The card overstates the context, documents little about tool calls, and has no safety results.

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

Ling-3.1-flash-1019

  1. Serve it with SGLang 0.5.23 or later on 8 H200 or 4 GB300 GPUs, per the card, and use this repository's name as the model path, not the earlier one the card's command shows
  2. With vLLM pass --trust-remote-code, --tool-call-parser ling3 and --reasoning-parser ling3
  3. Set chat_template_kwargs enable_thinking false for direct answers. Reasoning comes back in reasoning_content per SGLang's cookbook
  4. Plan on 262,144 tokens of context. The 1M figure needs the YaRN override in SGLang's cookbook
  5. Use temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20, per the card
  6. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

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, Ling-3.1-flash-1019 or LongCat-2.5?

Ling-3.1-flash-1019 scores 54.8 (C) on agent readiness against LongCat-2.5's 50.5 (D), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. LongCat-2.5 leads on risk and agent interface.

Other comparisons with Ling-3.1-flash-1019 or LongCat-2.5

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