2026-10-03 (verified to the primary; record correction + status
change): Clef is open-weights — blog (Oct 1): "we're fully open-
sourcing these models on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license"
(our Oct 2 digests called Clef an entrant but missed the license;
the Cloudflare challenger is the open model). And the no-runner
status moves: Cloudflare published the
category's first cross-vendor comparison table — vendor-run, but a
real table: 9 sample rows from 43 eval benchmarks run total,
scored on what it calls the "Jev Decision Index" with a live
demo site. Clef leads most rows (BFCL 98.47, BANKING77 94.2,
CLINC150 97.43); Jev wins When2Call (80.97 vs Clef 72.37),
BRIGHT (47.52 vs 45.91) and agent-trace-observability (71.6);
Laya leads PhishNChips (85.35). Latency: median Clef 209ms /
Clef-flash 38.8ms / Jev 524ms; Laya 5.8ms ("very fast but trades
off quality"); DiffusionGemma-Jev 84.4; Kev-9B 51.4. On TypeSafe's
own eval suite Cloudflare claims 3-of-4 over Jev. Spec deltas:
vision encoder + 64k context (Jev: text-only, 32k); Jev-API
compatible (noul/choice/score, @cf/cloudflare/clef); no-read/no-train
enterprise claim; fine-tuning = FDE service now, self-serve RL
platform later; trained on DiffusionGemma adapted to output
logprobs, building on independent research by Matt Mastrac[h?].
Three new entrants named in the table: DiffusionGemma Jev, Kev-9B,
Laya (provenance unknown — not in our feeds; verify who ships
them). Status change, precise wording: the category now has a
runner TABLE, vendor-run; what still does not exist is an
independent run on identical labeled workloads — the two vendors
selling (Cloudflare, and TypeSafe whose index Cloudflare
borrowed)
grade each other's products. Eleven-way field if the table's three
unknowns are real. Sizes (also from the same blog): the DiffusionGemma
logprobs experiment was their earlier demo — production Clef is a
frozen Qwen3.8-27B backbone (routing head + rank-256 LoRA, label-
smoothed CE + Brier-loss calibration, synthetic permutation datasets,
RLCD secondary objective), Clef-flash is frozen Qwen3.5-9B;
prefill-only, non-autoregressive scoring. Same weight class as
pplx-decider-v1-27b; Strands Decider is the 2B outlier.
2026-10-01/02 two more entrants inside 24h. (1) Cloudflare
trained its own decision models — Clef and Clef-flash (blog,
~9:52 PM ET Oct 1, after the Oct 1 digests cut): an edge-network
owner shipping the category as a routing play. (2) AWS
open-sourced Strands Decider 2B (Oct 1, search feed): 2B params,
weights + training recipe + evals — "fully open-source," one notch
beyond Perplexity's weights-only release. Same window: WSJ-grade
writeup on Jev "sparking copycats and talk of LLM alternatives";
Arav's "bring down the price even further over the coming days".
Runner question is now seven-way
(adds Strands, Clef) — still no independent run of any of them on
the same workloads.