IBM has quietly launched Granite 4.1, a new family of dense open-source models under the Apache 2.0 license, designed specifically for real enterprise workloads rather than demos. The lineup supports a massive 128K context and includes three model sizes: 30B for maximum performance, 8B balancing accuracy and efficiency, and a lightweight 3B version for edge devices.

Key strengths of Granite 4.1 include multilingual support for 12 languages, strong instruction following, tool calling capabilities, and suitability for agentic scenarios and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The models are aimed at business agents and automation, making Granite 4.1 one of the most practical and balanced open-source releases this year.

More details can be found at Hugging Face.