Cisco Foundation AI Releases Antares 350M and 1B

July 21, 2026

Antares family built on IBM Granite 4.0; two-stage SFT + GRPO. Apache 2.0 open weights for 350M/1B plus VLoc Bench (500 tasks).

Reported File F1 (vendor bench): Antares-1B 0.209; Antares-3B 0.223 (not released); GPT-5.5 ~0.229. Granite base checkpoints ~0.000 under same protocol — post-training supplies capability. Dual-use gating; 3B product-bound.