Reflection AI, the startup billing itself as America’s answer to open-source Chinese AI, is releasing its first model, called Beam.
The company, founded in 2024 by former DeepMind researchers, is positioning Beam as a “workhorse” that performs better than other Western open models. The model is particularly strong at coding and agentic tasks, cofounder and CEO Misha Laskin told Semafor. It also needs three to four times less computing power to reason through a problem than comparable open models, he said, making it faster and cheaper to run.
The model’s capabilities are comparable to one of China’s Z.ai’s recent models, GLM-5.2, which was released in June; Beam is “approaching” the performance of Alibaba’s most advanced model, Qwen 3.8-Max, which trails the top closed American models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
China’s startups and tech giants have led the world in open-source AI. Several large Western companies have recently embraced Chinese models as a way to reduce costs for certain repetitive tasks like customer service and writing routine code. Beijing has also promoted open source as a diplomatic tool to help other countries in their tech development. But because open models can be downloaded and run with fewer safeguards, their rise has also raised security concerns: US and UK government evaluators found that recent Chinese models could help hackers exploit code vulnerabilities.
New York-based Reflection sees a large market in businesses, governments, and other entities building sovereign AI systems that don’t or can’t use Chinese models, but still want to “own” and control how they use AI, Laskin said.
“They don’t really have very good options today,” he said.
Reflection is already training its next model, which Laskin said would be “much more” powerful and performant than Beam.