Baidu: ERNIE 4.5 21B A3B Thinking
Analysis Summary
Baidu: ERNIE 4.5 21B A3B Thinking sits in the Legacy tier on our leaderboard, ranked #375 of 557 published models on overall intelligence. At $0.070 input and $0.280 output per 1M tokens, it is among the most expensive on the market. It offers a standard large context window and supports reasoning.
Editorial notes
Baidu ERNIE 4.5 21B A3B Thinking has no benchmark data; it is priced very competitively but capability cannot be assessed and a regional accessibility penalty applies.
Assessed May 14, 2026
Rankings consider pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and real-world applicability and are refreshed as new models launch. Feedback?
Performance Profile
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking is Baidu's upgraded lightweight MoE model, refined to boost reasoning depth and quality for top-tier performance in logical puzzles, math, science, coding, text generation, and expert-level academic benchmarks.
How does Baidu: ERNIE 4.5 21B A3B Thinking stack up?
Compare side-by-side with other legacy models.
Model Information
| OpenRouter ID |
baidu/ernie-4.5-21b-a3b-thinking
|
| Provider | baidu |
| Release Date | October 9, 2025 |
| Context Length | 131,072 tokens |
| Max Completion | 65,536 tokens |
| Status | Active |
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.07 | $0.000070 |
| Output | $0.28 | $0.000280 |
