Poolside Releases Laguna XS.2 — First Open-Weight 33B Coding Model Hits 68.2% on SWE-bench Verified (April 28, 2026)

American AI startup Poolside on April 28, 2026 released Laguna XS.2, its first open-weight model — a 33-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts coder under the permissive Apache 2.0 license that runs on a single GPU and scores 68.2% on SWE-bench Verified. The company simultaneously launched a larger proprietary sibling, Laguna M.1, plus a terminal-based agent named pool.

What Happened

Poolside, which has reportedly raised more than $500M to date, announced the dual release on its company blog and on X. Laguna XS.2 is a 33B total / 3B active MoE model with a 128K context window, fully trained in-house on the company's own stack. The weights are on Hugging Face and the agent harness ships as a research preview.

The bigger model, Laguna M.1, is a 225B total / 23B active MoE that posts 72.5% on SWE-bench Verified, 65.1% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 47.6% on SWE-bench Pro — putting it within striking distance of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet and OpenAI's o-series on agentic coding benchmarks. M.1 is closed-weights and currently API-only.

Key Details

• Architecture — Laguna XS.2 is a 33B-total, 3B-active MoE; Laguna M.1 is 225B-total, 23B-active. Both target agentic coding and long-horizon tasks.
• Context window — 128K tokens on XS.2, with M.1 pushing higher.
• License — Laguna XS.2 ships under Apache 2.0 with full commercial use; M.1 remains proprietary.
• Benchmarks (XS.2) — 68.2% SWE-bench Verified, 62.4% SWE-bench Multilingual, 44.5% SWE-bench Pro, 30.1% Terminal-Bench 2.0.
• Hardware — XS.2 runs on a single GPU, making it deployable for local agent workflows via Ollama, vLLM, and the new pool CLI.
• Tooling — A dual Agent Client Protocol (ACP) client/server is bundled, mirroring Poolside's internal RL training and eval rig.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

On Hacker News, the top comment praises Poolside for shipping "the first open-weight 30B model that actually competes with closed frontier on real coding tasks," while skeptics note that SWE-bench Verified is a contested benchmark and want to see independent reproductions. On r/LocalLLaMA, the conversation is enthusiastic — local agent users see XS.2 as a credible alternative to Qwen 3 Coder and DeepSeek-Coder for sub-40B local deployments. On X, Poolside founder Eiso Kant emphasized that the model was "trained fully in-house on our own stack," a direct nod to the increasingly crowded field of frontier-coder labs.

What This Means for Developers

For developers running local agentic-coding setups, Laguna XS.2 is the most capable Apache-2.0 weight under 40B available today. It slots cleanly into Ollama, LM Studio, and vLLM, and the bundled pool CLI gives an out-of-the-box terminal agent without the heavier dependency chain of Aider or OpenHands. Teams already using SWE-bench harnesses will want to re-run their own evals — Poolside's headline numbers were measured with their internal scaffolding, which the company has open-sourced as part of the release for reproducibility.

For paid coding-agent users on Cursor, Windsurf, or Copilot, the larger Laguna M.1 is now available via Poolside's API and through Puter.js. Pricing has not been publicly posted; the company says enterprise deployments include private fine-tuning on customer code.

What's Next

Poolside says broader benchmark releases and a Laguna L-series flagship are on the 2026 roadmap. Hugging Face downloads for XS.2 crossed 50,000 within the first 24 hours, and community quantizations (GGUF, MLX, AWQ) are already appearing. The next milestone to watch is whether independent evaluators reproduce the SWE-bench numbers — a known sticking point for any new coder-model launch.

Sources

• Poolside — Introducing Laguna XS.2 and Laguna M.1 — primary announcement from the company blog.
• Poolside — Laguna XS.2 and M.1: A Deeper Dive — technical details and full benchmark table.
• VentureBeat coverage — independent reporting on the release.
• MarkTechPost — benchmark deep-dive.
• Hugging Face model card — official weights and configuration.
• Poolside on X — founder announcement thread.