Beam 1.0 501B A23B: pricing, context and benchmarks

What you need to know about Beam 1.0 501B A23B

Beam 1.0 501B A23B was released by Reflection AI (United States) on October 16, 2026. It accepts text as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 1,048,576 tokens, larger than 93 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 131,072 tokens in one go.

It is a recent model: real-world feedback and independent scores are still scarce.

Beam 1.0 501B A23B pricing

On OpenRouter, Beam 1.0 501B A23B costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.438 per million, more expensive than 37 % of paid models (1.7 times cheaper than the median of $0.76).

A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.001. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $30 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.05 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Beam 1.0 501B A23B. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Features, privacy and local use

• It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
• It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
• It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.
• Its knowledge stops at June 2026.

Its weights are open and downloadable from Hugging Face (apache-2.0 licence): you can run it on your own machines without sending your data to a third party. With 501,267,612,352 billion parameters, it needs about 280,105,105,984 GB of memory at 4-bit quantisation. Check with the VRAM calculator. It was downloaded 5,209 times on Hugging Face last month.