Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview: a 280B MoE with 14B active and a 1M-token context, at $0.28 / $1.13 on OpenRouter, with Apache 2.0 weights promised

Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview on November 11, the first post-trained model built on the ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base checkpoint it published on November 5. Baidu's release post says the model has 280B total parameters with 14B active and a 1M-token context, that its API is available on Baidu's Qianfan platform, and that the weights will be open-sourced under Apache 2.0 soon.

THE PRICE

Per 1M tokens on OpenRouter, whose baidu/ernie-5.5-flash-preview listing is stamped 17:58 UTC on November 10 (prices read 07:50 UTC on November 11):

• Input: $0.28
• Output: $1.13
• Cache reads: $0.028
• A free variant (baidu/ernie-5.5-flash-preview:free) is listed too.
• Context: 1,024,000 tokens, with up to 921,600 output tokens. Text in, text out, with tool calling and adjustable reasoning effort.

WHAT BAIDU SAYS IT DOES

• Baidu pitches coding, 3D modeling, knowledge work and content creation, and says it keeps decoding fast for its size. These are Baidu's own claims.
• Baidu's examples: a third-person Unreal Engine 5.8 game written in C++ in one 11-hour agent run, nearly 100 mobile mini-games built from design documents, and an airport and airliner modeled in Blender by two agents.
• Baidu notes it is a text-only model, so in the game example it turned playtest problems into code tests instead of looking at the screen.

HOW WE CAUGHT IT

ArtificialWatch's radar first saw baidu/ernie-5.5-flash-preview on OpenRouter at 19:19 UTC on November 10 and sent an early-version alert at 19:22 UTC, the day before Baidu's release post. A second alert went out at 07:44 UTC on November 11, when OpenRouter's free listing of the same preview (baidu/ernie-5.5-flash-preview:free) was read as the final release. That one was our mistake, and we are fixing the hunt so the final ERNIE 5.5 Flash still gets its own alert.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

When the weights ship (Baidu says only 'soon'), when the final ERNIE 5.5 Flash replaces the preview, and Qianfan's own price. Baidu's own benchmark tables are on its post; ArtificialWatch has not seen third-party scores yet. Baidu World 2026 opens in Beijing on November 12 (01:00 UTC), where more ERNIE news may land.