# Ripple-65B Preview: a dense 65B open-weight model that reports 80.5 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, Apache 2.0

Canonical: https://theagenticweekly.com/news/ripple-65b-preview-open-weight-coding-model · Evidence: Reported · First seen: 2026-11-04 20:14 UTC · Source published: not stated by the source · Brief published: 2026-11-04 21:09 UTC · Updated: 2026-11-04 21:09 UTC · Author: Agentic Weekly

> Ricursive Intelligence released Ripple-65B Preview on November 4, 2026, a dense 65B-parameter open-weight model (Apache 2.0) that it says scores "80.52" on TerminalBench 2.1, ahead of much larger US open-weight models. It supports up to 1M tokens of context and is on Hugging Face, Together AI, GMI Cloud and OpenRouter.

Models in this brief: [Ripple-65B Preview](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/ripple-65b-preview), [Muse Spark Open](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/muse-spark-open)

## What changed

- New model from a new lab: a 65B-parameter dense Transformer (not Mixture-of-Experts) pretrained from scratch on 12 trillion tokens of mostly English text and code, with support for up to 1M tokens of context.
- Ricursive reports 80.52 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, above the self-reported scores it lists for Reflection Beam 501B (80.1), Muse Spark Open 816B (76.4), Inkling 975B (63.8) and Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B (56.4).
- The model card also lists 76.5 on SWE-bench Verified and 61.42 on SWE-bench Pro v1.0, both below Reflection Beam's 81.6 and 66.1 in the same table, so the coding lead is benchmark-specific.
- Weights are Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face: a BF16 instruction-tuned model, an NVFP4 checkpoint and a BF16 base model. Ricursive says it can run locally on an NVIDIA DGX Spark.
- Hosted access on day one through Together AI, GMI Cloud and OpenRouter, with Fireworks listed as going live later the same day.
- Ricursive puts its full R&D cost at 32 million dollars and says Terminal-Bench 2.1 was reached with 1.4M RL rollouts; the post-training is described as relatively light and focused on agentic coding.

## In the source's words

> "The model is pretrained on 12 trillion tokens with support for up to 1M context length."
> (Ricursive Intelligence, Introducing Ripple-65B Preview, https://www.ricursive.com/ripple)

> "Our Preview release has gone through relatively light posttraining, with a focus on agentic coding."
> (Ricursive Intelligence, Ripple-65B Preview model card on Hugging Face, https://huggingface.co/ricursiveAI/Ripple-65B-Preview)

## What we have not verified

- We did not run Ripple-65B Preview; every benchmark score is Ricursive's own, and the model card says some comparison scores come from its in-house eval flow rather than official model cards.
- The announcement page has no machine-readable publish time; the date is from the page's November 4, 2026 release and the Hugging Face repository.
- We did not check hosted pricing or rate limits on Together AI, GMI Cloud, OpenRouter or Fireworks.
- The 32 million dollar cost and the one-tenth comparison are Ricursive's estimates, not audited figures.

## Timeline

- Source published: not stated by the source
- First seen by our watcher: 2026-11-04 20:14 UTC (via Hacker News front page (AI posts); primary sources are Ricursive's announcement and the Hugging Face model card)
- Brief published: 2026-11-04 21:09 UTC

## Sources

- [Ricursive Intelligence: Introducing Ripple-65B Preview](https://www.ricursive.com/ripple) (primary source) (fetched 2026-11-04)
- [Hugging Face model card: ricursiveAI/Ripple-65B-Preview](https://huggingface.co/ricursiveAI/Ripple-65B-Preview) (primary source) (fetched 2026-11-04)
- [Hacker News discussion (signal)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50369925) (fetched 2026-11-04)

## Related

- [Ripple-65B Preview: specs, price and alternatives](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/ripple-65b-preview)
- [Muse Spark Open: specs, price and alternatives](https://theagenticweekly.com/models/muse-spark-open)
- [All news briefs](https://theagenticweekly.com/news)
- [This week's releases](https://theagenticweekly.com/this-week)
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## How to cite

Agentic Weekly, "Ripple-65B Preview: a dense 65B open-weight model that reports 80.5 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, Apache 2.0", published 2026-11-04 21:09 UTC, https://theagenticweekly.com/news/ripple-65b-preview-open-weight-coding-model