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Research · Jul 23, 2026, 02:34 PM · 3 sources

Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1: 118B open-weight coding model matches models 10x larger, trains in under 9 weeks

<cite index="21-2">Poolside released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) system that activates only 8 billion parameters per token, supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens</cite>, and <cite index="21-2">matches or beats open models several times its size on agentic coding tasks</cite>. <cite index="21-2">The weights are available immediately on Hugging Face under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license</cite>.

<cite index="21-4">Laguna S 2.1 scores 70.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, placing it 11th on the company's compiled leaderboard — ahead of DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, a 1.6-trillion-parameter model that scored 64.0</cite>. <cite index="21-4">On SWE-Bench Multilingual, it posts 78.5%, and on SWE-Bench Pro's public dataset, 59.4%</cite>. <cite index="22-5">Laguna S 2.1 took less than 4 weeks to train end to end on 4,000 H200 GPUs</cite>.

<cite index="21-5">Poolside's core business is deploying models inside the security boundaries of government, defense, and regulated enterprises — customers for whom closed, metered API access is often not acceptable</cite>. For teams running agentic coding workloads, the ability to self-host a 118B MoE model on a single DGX Spark removes API-dependency friction; the open-weight license and reproducible benchmarks matter more in this market segment than frontier leaderboard position.

Sources

Everything this brief rests on
  1. 01 Primary source venturebeat.com
  2. 02 Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, the West's most capable open-weight model globenewswire.com “On Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro, Laguna S 2.1 matches or exceeds models several times its size”
  3. 03 Poolside: Introducing Laguna S 2.1 poolside.ai “It occupies a size class that no Western lab has released an open-weight model into in 11 months, since gpt-oss-120b release in August last year”