Thinking Machines: Inkling
Analysis Summary
Thinking Machines' Inkling is a multimodal model built for substantial reasoning and software work. It combines strong coding capability with a one-million-token context window, vision and audio input, tool use, and function calling. That combination gives it broad utility across codebases, complex documents, and mixed-media requests.
Client workflows could use Inkling for software engineering, long-document review, multimodal research, and content operations that need careful instruction adherence. Its agentic capability is useful but not at the level of the strongest autonomous systems, so complex tool chains should retain validation and human oversight.
The pricing is premium relative to value-tier models. It is a strong specialist and secondary general model for clients who need multimodal context and coding depth in one API, while routine traffic should be routed elsewhere.
Assessed August 9, 2026
Editorial notes
Inkling pairs strong reasoning and coding with a one-million-token context, vision, audio input, and tool calling. Its premium pricing and moderate agentic results position it for demanding multimodal work rather than high-volume automation.
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DFO Verdict
Inkling pairs strong reasoning and coding with a one-million-token context, vision, audio input, and tool calling. Its premium pricing and moderate agentic results position it for demanding multimodal work rather than high-volume automation.
How Thinking Machines: Inkling compares
Thinking Machines: Inkling ranks #49 of 427 AI models we track for overall intelligence, #62 of 200 for coding, #47 of 182 for agentic tasks. Its 1M-token context window is larger than 95% of the models we list. At $0.95 per million input tokens it is cheaper than 28% of comparable models.
Dark bar = input · light bar = output, scaled to the priciest peer.
1M tokens ≈ 8 full-length novels or ~2,500 pages of business documents in a single request.
Strongest on content. The pulled-in technical corner is the trade-off, and if the shape matters more than the price, this is your model.
Compare shapes side-by-side →Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.95 | $0.000950 |
| Output | $4.05 | $0.004050 |
What would Thinking Machines: Inkling cost your business?
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A website chatbot handling around 100 customer conversations a day, a few short messages each.
Full calculator with 714 models → Price Calculator
These numbers get smaller with the right architecture.
We route routine calls to cheap models and save Thinking Machines: Inkling for the hard ones. Most clients cut their estimate by 60-80%.
Talk to our teamAbout Thinking Machines: Inkling
Inkling is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Thinking Machines Lab, with 41B active parameters out of 975B total. It is designed for general-purpose reasoning, coding, agentic and tool-use systems,..
Frequently asked questions about Thinking Machines: Inkling
How much does Thinking Machines: Inkling cost?
Thinking Machines: Inkling costs $0.95 per million input tokens and $4.05 per million output tokens.
What is the context window of Thinking Machines: Inkling?
Thinking Machines: Inkling has a context window of 1,048,576 tokens (1M).
Is Thinking Machines: Inkling good for coding?
On our coding benchmark index, Thinking Machines: Inkling ranks #62 of 200 models, placing it in the broader range of the field for code generation and debugging.
What can Thinking Machines: Inkling do?
Thinking Machines: Inkling supports image/vision input, tool use, and function calling.
Who created Thinking Machines: Inkling?
Thinking Machines: Inkling is developed by Thinking Machines and was released on July 17, 2026.