Baseten releases elephant-1, a 9B decision model at a quarter of the cost

What the research found

Baseten's Base Labs released elephant-1, a 9B decision model from Qwen3.5-9B that ties d1-ultra at 65 on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index for about a quarter of the cost, with a free API week until Oct 27; the MIT license claim could not be confirmed from cached text.

Claims and how well the evidence supports them

1. elephant-1 ties d1-ultra at 65 on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index 98%
2. elephant-1 costs about $8 per 1M tasks versus about $31 for d1-ultra 99%
3. Max context is 16k and free API access with zero data retention runs until Oct 27 98%
4. elephant-1 is a 9B open-weight model post-trained from Qwen3.5-9B under MIT license (unverified in cached text) 14%

Evidence

• huggingface.co https://huggingface.co/baselabs/elephant-1
• labs.baseten.co https://labs.baseten.co/articles/mammoth-1-and-elephant-1-frontier-decision-models
• baseten.co https://www.baseten.co/blog/the-best-decision-models-in-the-world-mammoth-1-and-elephant-1/

Actionability rated high.