{
  "id": 11276963,
  "title": "Cloudflare tries to outplay Jev with open-weight Clef models",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/01/cloudflare-tries-to-outplay-jev-with-open-weight-clef-models",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-01T20:39:49.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register",
    "slug": "the-register",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/01/cloudflare-tries-to-outplay-jev-with-open-weight-clef-models/5300649"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Two weeks have passed since Jev stunned the AI world, and now Cloudflare has announced its own Clef decision models. These models boast the claim of being smarter, faster, and open weight, runnable locally. Clef and Clef-flash are the two models that make up the Clef family. Both Clef and Clef-flash can answer three types of structured questions: yes/no, multiple choice, and rankings. Clef, however, has some notable differences and advantages over Jev.\n\nClef is built with a unique LLM backbone, specifically using Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B. These Qwen backbones perform a prefill-only pass during inference. Clef also moves faster than Jev and scores choices in parallel after the prefill-only pass. While the exact architecture of Jev remains a secret, Cloudflare's benchmark claims suggest Clef is not only faster but also more accurate than Jev and other decision models.\n\nClef can handle images and video in addition to text, and supports a larger 64k context window. While Jev can also process up to 64k tokens, Clef's state and individual question limits are larger at 32k. Cloudflare hosts Clef on Workers AI, making it even faster due to low network latency and edge GPU advantage.\n\nFor those hesitant to pay the token cost, Clef is also open weight under Apache-2.0 terms on Hugging Face. However, the training datasets are not publicly available. Clef-flash can run on any GPU with at least 41 GB of VRAM, while Clef requires 85 GB of VRAM. Despite the potential differences in speed and accuracy, Clef is compatible with Jev's API, allowing it to function as a drop-in replacement for users who wish to give it a try.",
  "summary": "Sure, it costs more, but it can handle images and video and it's available on Hugging Face if you have the hardware horsepower to run it locally",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 3,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "The Register Science",
        "title": "Cloudflare tries to outplay Jev with open-weight Clef models",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/01/cloudflare-tries-to-outplay-jev-with-open-weight-clef-models-11281564",
        "published": "2026-10-01T20:39:49.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "Slashdot",
        "title": "Cloudflare Tries to Outplay Jev With Open-Weight Clef Models",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/01/cloudflare-tries-to-outplay-jev-with-open-weight-clef-models-11294918",
        "published": "2026-10-01T22:00:00.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}