# MBZUAI's IFM releases PAN 2, an open 29B world model that simulates actions as video

Canonical: https://theagenticweekly.com/news/ifm-pan-2-open-world-model · Evidence: Reported · First seen: 2026-11-11 07:53 UTC · Source published: not stated by the source · Brief published: 2026-11-11 08:00 UTC · Updated: 2026-11-11 08:00 UTC · Author: Agentic Weekly

> The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at MBZUAI released PAN 2 on Nov 10, 2026, an Apache 2.0 world model whose 29B-parameter diffusion backbone turns an observation and text actions into "a video of up to 20 seconds," per its model card. IFM says it ranks first among open-weight models on the Physics-IQ Verified leaderboard.

Models in this brief: [PAN 2](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/pan-2)

## What changed

- PAN 2 is a general-purpose world model: given a current observation (an optional image plus text) and actions described in text, it renders the predicted outcome as video, 704x1248 at 24 fps and up to 20 seconds long, according to the model card.
- The system splits the work in two. An LLM (the conceptual reasoner) writes a structured, time-stamped description of the next world state, and a 29B-parameter MMDiT diffusion model trained from scratch turns that into video latents, decoded by the Wan 2.2 VAE with Qwen3.5-9B as the frozen text encoder.
- IFM is releasing the diffusion weights plus full training and inference code under Apache 2.0; the model card says PAN 2 also runs in Diffusers and vLLM, and ships a prompt-rewriter agent skill for Codex and Claude Code that enforces a 1,536-token caption limit.
- On IFM's own evaluations, the press release says PAN 2 placed just behind MiniMax-H3 and ahead of four other models across six simulation dimensions, completed the most full multi-step plans of any model tested, and ranks third overall and first among open-weight models on the Physics-IQ Verified leaderboard.
- IFM recommends running PAN 2 behind a separate pan2-guardrail package; in internal tests it cut the share of harmful text-to-video requests that produced an unsafe video from 33.9% to 1.5%, while also blocking 11.5% of benign text-to-video requests.

## In the source's words

> "Given a current observation (an optional image plus text) and actions described in text, it simulates the outcome as a video of up to 20 seconds."
> (IFM, PAN 2 model card on Hugging Face, https://huggingface.co/IFM/PAN2)

## What we have not verified

- We did not run PAN 2; every benchmark, ranking and guardrail figure comes from IFM's model card and press release.
- The model card does not state GPU memory requirements or generation time per clip; its inference script loads the full 29B diffusion model on every GPU worker.
- The model card lists Claude Opus 5.5 as the conceptual reasoner for the public leaderboard entry, so the Physics-IQ result reflects PAN 2 paired with a closed LLM, not the diffusion model alone.
- We could not open IFM's technical blog post directly (it returned an error to our fetcher), so details that appear only there are not reflected here.

## Timeline

- Source published: not stated by the source
- First seen by our watcher: 2026-11-11 07:53 UTC (via MarkTechPost (signal); verified against IFM's model card and press release)
- Brief published: 2026-11-11 08:00 UTC

## Sources

- [Hugging Face: IFM/PAN2 model card](https://huggingface.co/IFM/PAN2) (primary source) (fetched 2026-11-11)
- [GitHub: ifm-ai/PAN2 (training and inference code)](https://github.com/ifm-ai/PAN2) (primary source) (fetched 2026-11-11)
- [IFM press release: PAN 2](https://ifm.ai/pan2/press-release/) (primary source) (fetched 2026-11-11)
- [MarkTechPost: IFM releases PAN 2](https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/11/10/ifm-pan-2-open-world-model/) (fetched 2026-11-11)

## Related

- [PAN 2: specs, price and alternatives](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/pan-2)
- [All news briefs](https://theagenticweekly.com/news)
- [New AI models this week](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/this-week)
- [AI model releases by month](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/releases)
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## How to cite

Agentic Weekly, "MBZUAI's IFM releases PAN 2, an open 29B world model that simulates actions as video", published 2026-11-11 08:00 UTC, https://theagenticweekly.com/news/ifm-pan-2-open-world-model