New on the radar: Ernie 5.5 Flash appeared in OpenRouter catalog

Our hourly sweep found an id that was not there an hour ago.

Catalog id: baidu/ernie-5.5-flash-preview
Listed price: $0.28/$1.13 per 1M
Context window: 1,024,000 tokens
First observed by our sweep: 2026-11-10 20:15 UTC
Source: OpenRouter catalog

This entry is machine-written from what the sweep actually read, and nothing else. A catalog listing is a primary source for exactly one narrow fact — that this id now exists, at this price, with this context window — and it is not evidence of anything beyond that. It does not tell you the model is good, that the listing is intentional, that the weights are open, or that the vendor has announced it. Those questions need a human and an editor's judgement, and this item deliberately does not answer them.

It maps to Ernie 5.5 Flash, already on our watchlist — registry note: only its base checkpoint is out · Nov 5: Baidu released ERNIE-5.5-Flash-Base on Hugging Face in FP8 and BF16, the checkpoint at the end of pre-training before any post-training: a 280B-total, 14B-active MoE trained on 33.5T tokens, 128K training context and 1M for fine-tuning and inference (Baidu's model card) · Baidu's blog: 'The post-trained ERNIE 5.5 Flash will follow', with no date · the base license (ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base Model License v1.0) does not cover the EU, the UK or South Korea, and commercial use above US$50M of related revenue needs Baidu's written authorization · Baidu World 2026 is Nov 12 in Beijing, where Baidu's ticket FAQ asks opening-ceremony guests to be seated by 09:00 Beijing time (01:00 UTC; 8 pm EST on Nov 11) · our alert is for the post-trained model, not a listing of the base weights.