The American-made open-source model 'Laguna XS 2.1' has appeared, running locally and outperforming Claude Haiku 4.5 in some tests.



Poolside, an AI development company based in the United States, announced its AI model ' Laguna XS 2.1 ' on July 2, 2026. Laguna XS 2.1 is an enhanced version of

Laguna XS.2, which was released in April 2026.

Introducing Laguna XS 2.1 — Poolside
https://poolside.ai/blog/introducing-laguna-xs-2-1

poolside/Laguna-XS-2.1 · Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co/poolside/Laguna-XS-2.1

While American companies are at the forefront of the industry in the field of closed models such as ChatGPT and Claude, Chinese companies like Alibaba and Z.ai are emerging in the field of open models where AI models are freely released. Poolside is an American company that develops its own AI, including pre-training, and is taking a rare approach for an American company to open up its AI models. Laguna XS.2, released by Poolside in April 2026, is a MoE model with a total of 33 billion parameters and 3 billion active parameters, and has attracted attention as an open model from an American company other than big tech companies like Google and Meta.

American company releases high-performance, locally-running open-source model 'Laguna XS.2' - Can it compete with the Chinese companies that are making great strides in the open-source market? - GIGAZINE



The newly released Laguna XS 2.1 is an updated version of Laguna XS 2, and like its predecessor, it is a MoE model with a total of 33 billion parameters and 3 billion active parameters.

The graph below shows the benchmark scores for 'Laguna XS 2.1 (33B)', 'Laguna XS.2 (33B)', 'Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (35B)', 'North Mini Code (30B)', 'MAI-Code-1-Flash (137B)', 'gpt-oss-120b (120B)', 'Claude Haiku 4.5 (number of parameters not disclosed)', and 'GPT-5.4 Nano (number of parameters not disclosed)'. The Laguna XS 2.1 recorded a significantly higher score than the Laguna XS.2 in SWE-bench Multilingual, which measures support for various programming languages, and also outperformed Claude Haiku 4.5 in several tests. On the other hand, the Chinese-made model Qwen3.6-35B-A3B scored higher in all benchmark tests.



Laguna XS 2.1 is designed for local operation and can run on a Mac with 36GB of memory. Laguna XS 2.1 is available at the following link, and quantized versions with 'FP8,' 'INT4,' and 'NVFP4' are also available to support machines with less memory.

Laguna XS 2.1 - a poolside Collection
https://huggingface.co/collections/poolside/laguna-xs-21



The license uses OpenMDW , promoted by NVIDIA and the Linux Foundation, and is touted as providing developers with a consistent framework for use, modification, and deployment.




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