IBM Launches Granite 4.2 Open Reasoning Models

IBM’s Granite family targets businesses seeking smaller, openly available AI models that can run across cloud, on-premises and edge systems. The release comes as companies move beyond chatbots toward agents capable of planning tasks, selecting tools and checking their own work. Open licensing and a choice of model sizes could give enterprises greater control over deployment costs, customization and sensitive data than closed, API-only systems.

IBM released Granite 4.2 on Aug. 25, 2026, offering dense, decoder-only models with 3 billion, 8 billion and 30 billion parameters. All three support native reasoning, tool calling and thinking, non-thinking and low-effort modes, while the 8B and 30B versions also received agentic reinforcement learning for software engineering, terminal and search tasks. The models were pretrained on about 15 trillion tokens, support context windows of up to 512,000 tokens and are available under the Apache 2.0 license for commercial use.