# Yandex releases 80B MoE base model under Apache 2.0

> AliceAI-Foundation is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with just 3B active parameters, aimed at Russian and English text.

Published by The Open Weights on Sep 12, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/aliceai-foundation-80b-a3b-h8qu

## Key facts

- Company: Yandex
- Model: AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base
- Version: 80B-A3B-Base
- Category: Text / LLM
- Modalities: Text / LLM
- License: Apache 2.0 (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Parameters: 80B (mixture of experts)
- Active parameters: 3B
- Context window: 262K tokens
- Architecture: AliceAIForCausalLM
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 162.6 GB
- Languages: ru, en
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-09-12
- Last verified: 2026-09-29
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/yandex/AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/aliceai-foundation-80b-a3b-h8qu

Yandex has published AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base, an 80-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The model is available now on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/yandex/AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base).

Despite its 80B total size, the model activates only about 3B parameters per token — the "A3B" in its name. That sparse design is the core appeal of MoE architectures: they aim to deliver the knowledge capacity of a large model while keeping inference costs closer to those of a much smaller dense one. It targets text in Russian and English.

## Why it matters

This is a base model rather than an instruction-tuned chat variant, which makes it a foundation for developers who want to fine-tune for their own tasks. A few reasons it stands out:

- The Apache 2.0 license permits commercial use and modification with minimal restrictions.
- Strong Russian-language capability is comparatively rare among openly licensed frontier-scale models.
- The MoE design lowers the practical compute barrier for teams that want large-model quality.

As an initial release, the model arrives without a stated context length or published benchmark results in the record, so real-world evaluation will depend on the community putting it through its paces. Still, the combination of scale, an efficient architecture, and a genuinely open license makes AliceAI-Foundation a notable entry from a major player outside the usual US and Chinese labs.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/yandex/AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base)

## Sources

- [yandex/AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base](https://huggingface.co/yandex/AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base) — Hugging Face, Sep 12, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Yandex releases 80B MoE base model under Apache 2.0", The Open Weights, Sep 12, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/aliceai-foundation-80b-a3b-h8qu