At OpenRouter, we believe that free models play a crucial role in democratizing access to AI. These models allow hundreds of thousands of users worldwide to experiment, learn, and innovate. Below you will find the top free AI models currently available on OpenRouter.
We are continuing to actively expand our free model capacity by onboarding new providers and directly covering costs to help promote freely accessible models. While we can't guarantee what the future holds, we will continue to support free inference options on our platform.
DeepSeek-TNG-R1T2-Chimera is the second-generation Chimera model from TNG Tech. It is a 671 B-parameter mixture-of-experts text-generation model assembled from DeepSeek-AI’s R1-0528, R1, and V3-0324 checkpoints with an Assembly-of-Experts merge. The tri-parent design yields strong reasoning performance while running roughly 20 % faster than the original R1 and more than 2× faster than R1-0528 under vLLM, giving a favorable cost-to-intelligence trade-off. The checkpoint supports contexts up to 60 k tokens in standard use (tested to ~130 k) and maintains consistent <think> token behaviour, making it suitable for long-context analysis, dialogue and other open-ended generation tasks.
KAT-Coder-Pro V1 is KwaiKAT's most advanced agentic coding model in the KAT-Coder series. Designed specifically for agentic coding tasks, it excels in real-world software engineering scenarios, achieving 73.4% solve rate on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark.
The model has been optimized for tool-use capability, multi-turn interaction, instruction following, generalization, and comprehensive capabilities through a multi-stage training process, including mid-training, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), and scalable agentic RL.
NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2 VL is a 12-billion-parameter open multimodal reasoning model designed for video understanding and document intelligence. It introduces a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture, combining transformer-level accuracy with Mamba’s memory-efficient sequence modeling for significantly higher throughput and lower latency.
The model supports inputs of text and multi-image documents, producing natural-language outputs. It is trained on high-quality NVIDIA-curated synthetic datasets optimized for optical-character recognition, chart reasoning, and multimodal comprehension.
Nemotron Nano 2 VL achieves leading results on OCRBench v2 and scores ≈ 74 average across MMMU, MathVista, AI2D, OCRBench, OCR-Reasoning, ChartQA, DocVQA, and Video-MME—surpassing prior open VL baselines. With Efficient Video Sampling (EVS), it handles long-form videos while reducing inference cost.
Open-weights, training data, and fine-tuning recipes are released under a permissive NVIDIA open license, with deployment supported across NeMo, NIM, and major inference runtimes.
DeepSeek-R1T-Chimera is created by merging DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 (0324), combining the reasoning capabilities of R1 with the token efficiency improvements of V3. It is based on a DeepSeek-MoE Transformer architecture and is optimized for general text generation tasks.
The model merges pretrained weights from both source models to balance performance across reasoning, efficiency, and instruction-following tasks. It is released under the MIT license and intended for research and commercial use.
Devstral 2 is a state-of-the-art open-source model by Mistral AI specializing in agentic coding. It is a 123B-parameter dense transformer model supporting a 256K context window.
Devstral 2 supports exploring codebases and orchestrating changes across multiple files while maintaining architecture-level context. It tracks framework dependencies, detects failures, and retries with corrections—solving challenges like bug fixing and modernizing legacy systems. The model can be fine-tuned to prioritize specific languages or optimize for large enterprise codebases. It is available under a modified MIT license.
GLM-4.5-Air is the lightweight variant of our latest flagship model family, also purpose-built for agent-centric applications. Like GLM-4.5, it adopts the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture but with a more compact parameter size. GLM-4.5-Air also supports hybrid inference modes, offering a "thinking mode" for advanced reasoning and tool use, and a "non-thinking mode" for real-time interaction. Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the reasoning enabled boolean. Learn more in our docs
TNG-R1T-Chimera is an experimental LLM with a faible for creative storytelling and character interaction. It is a derivate of the original TNG/DeepSeek-R1T-Chimera released in April 2025 and is available exclusively via Chutes and OpenRouter.
Characteristics and improvements include:
We think that it has a creative and pleasant personality. It has a preliminary EQ-Bench3 value of about 1305. It is quite a bit more intelligent than the original, albeit a slightly slower. It is much more think-token consistent, i.e. reasoning and answer blocks are properly delineated. Tool calling is much improved.
TNG Tech, the model authors, ask that users follow the careful guidelines that Microsoft has created for their "MAI-DS-R1" DeepSeek-based model. These guidelines are available on Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/microsoft/MAI-DS-R1).
Nova 2 Lite is a fast, cost-effective reasoning model for everyday workloads that can process text, images, and videos to generate text.
Nova 2 Lite demonstrates standout capabilities in processing documents, extracting information from videos, generating code, providing accurate grounded answers, and automating multi-step agentic workflows.
Olmo 3 32B Think is a large-scale, 32-billion-parameter model purpose-built for deep reasoning, complex logic chains and advanced instruction-following scenarios. Its capacity enables strong performance on demanding evaluation tasks and highly nuanced conversational reasoning. Developed by Ai2 under the Apache 2.0 license, Olmo 3 32B Think embodies the Olmo initiative’s commitment to openness, offering full transparency across weights, code and training methodology.
Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) code generation model developed by the Qwen team. It is optimized for agentic coding tasks such as function calling, tool use, and long-context reasoning over repositories. The model features 480 billion total parameters, with 35 billion active per forward pass (8 out of 160 experts).
Pricing for the Alibaba endpoints varies by context length. Once a request is greater than 128k input tokens, the higher pricing is used.
gpt-oss-20b is an open-weight 21B parameter model released by OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 3.6B active parameters per forward pass, optimized for lower-latency inference and deployability on consumer or single-GPU hardware. The model is trained in OpenAI’s Harmony response format and supports reasoning level configuration, fine-tuning, and agentic capabilities including function calling, tool use, and structured outputs.
Gemma 3 introduces multimodality, supporting vision-language input and text outputs. It handles context windows up to 128k tokens, understands over 140 languages, and offers improved math, reasoning, and chat capabilities, including structured outputs and function calling. Gemma 3 27B is Google's latest open source model, successor to Gemma 2
The Meta Llama 3.3 multilingual large language model (LLM) is a pretrained and instruction tuned generative model in 70B (text in/text out). The Llama 3.3 instruction tuned text only model is optimized for multilingual dialogue use cases and outperforms many of the available open source and closed chat models on common industry benchmarks.
Supported languages: English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai.
Model Card
Qwen3-235B-A22B is a 235B parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model developed by Qwen, activating 22B parameters per forward pass. It supports seamless switching between a "thinking" mode for complex reasoning, math, and code tasks, and a "non-thinking" mode for general conversational efficiency. The model demonstrates strong reasoning ability, multilingual support (100+ languages and dialects), advanced instruction-following, and agent tool-calling capabilities. It natively handles a 32K token context window and extends up to 131K tokens using YaRN-based scaling.
Gemini Flash 2.0 offers a significantly faster time to first token (TTFT) compared to Gemini Flash 1.5, while maintaining quality on par with larger models like Gemini Pro 1.5. It introduces notable enhancements in multimodal understanding, coding capabilities, complex instruction following, and function calling. These advancements come together to deliver more seamless and robust agentic experiences.
LongCat-Flash-Chat is a large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 560B total parameters, of which 18.6B–31.3B (≈27B on average) are dynamically activated per input. It introduces a shortcut-connected MoE design to reduce communication overhead and achieve high throughput while maintaining training stability through advanced scaling strategies such as hyperparameter transfer, deterministic computation, and multi-stage optimization.
This release, LongCat-Flash-Chat, is a non-thinking foundation model optimized for conversational and agentic tasks. It supports long context windows up to 128K tokens and shows competitive performance across reasoning, coding, instruction following, and domain benchmarks, with particular strengths in tool use and complex multi-step interactions.