September 13, 2026 · The Decoder
AllSpark releases Iris open search agents, strongest in their class
AllSpark released Iris-mini and Iris-pro, open-source search agents built on Qwen models. The team says the models lead benchmarks among open-weight models of similar size, and that training also improved performance on unrelated tasks like general tool use and office work.
Why it matters: Generalization beyond the trained task is the harder problem in agent training, so this transfer effect, if it holds up under independent testing, suggests search-agent training data has broader value than expected. It adds to the fast-growing field of open-weight agentic models competing with closed tool-use offerings from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.