Key Terms
- Token Pack - a one-time purchase of a fixed token quota valid for 30 days, sold in limited-quantity flash sales at 10:00, 16:00, 21:00, and 23:00 Beijing Time; cache hits are free and do not consume pack tokens; consumed before pay-as-you-go balance. Source: Meituan – Token Pack
- API Pay-As-You-Go - prepaid balance deducted per request as (uncached input x price) + (cached input x price) + (output x price); balance never expires; failed requests (HTTP 401/403/429/500) are not billed. Source: Meituan – Api Pay As You Go
- Enterprise Verification - organizational KYC (org name, industry, country, business email on the international site) that unlocks self-service invoicing and tiered monthly discounts on pay-as-you-go usage, up to 40% off at $6,000+/month. Source: Meituan – Faq
- Cached input - tokens served from the provider's prompt cache at $0.006 per MTok, 50x cheaper than the $0.30 uncached input rate; the cache TTL is not documented. Source: Meituan – Longcat 2.0
- LongCat Sparse Attention (LSA) - LongCat-2.0's attention architecture extending DeepSeek V3.2's DSA indexer with Streaming-aware, Cross-Layer, and Hierarchical Indexing to cut indexer cost at 1M context. Source: Hugging Face – Longcat 2.0
- N-gram Embedding - 135B parameters inside LongCat-2.0 allocated to sparse n-gram lookup tables orthogonal to the MoE, claimed to beat equivalent-sized pure MoE models on parameter efficiency. Source: Hugging Face – Longcat 2.0
- ResearchSpec - the executable research agenda at the core of the LongCat-DeepResearch harness: planners draft it, researchers fill assigned sections in separate contexts, and editors assemble and revise the report without regenerating it. Source: GitHub – Longcat Deepresearch
Latest Changes
Changes since the 2026-08 report.
- New model: LongCat-2.5-Preview became available on the API platform Sep 25, adding image understanding (cross-modal Q&A, visual reasoning) on top of coding and agentic capability; priced identically to 2.0 at $0.30/$1.20 per MTok (limited-time). Source: Meituan – Change Log
- No open weights for 2.5: Hugging Face still lists LongCat-2.0, LongCat-2.0-FP8, LongCat-2.0-INT8 (all updated Jul 8) and LongCat-Flash-Lite-Sparse (Aug 4) as the newest checkpoints; LongCat-2.5-Preview weights are not released. Source: Hugging Face – Meituan Longcat
- Enterprise services: introduced Sep 2 (China site) and Sep 10 (international site): Enterprise Verification, self-service invoicing (VAT invoices in China, 1-3 business day issuance), and tiered pay-as-you-go discounts, 10% at $75/month up to 40% at $6,000/month internationally ($75/$300/$1,200/$6,000; ¥500/$2,000/$8,000/$40,000 in China). Source: Meituan – Change Log
- International payments: the longcat.ai site bills in USD via credit/debit card and Google Pay, ending the China-only payment constraint recorded in August (Alipay/WeChat Pay remain on longcat.chat). Source: Meituan – Api Pay As You Go
- Free access promo: LongCat-2.0 was made free to try in Cline on Sep 1-2 (Cline: "Choose LongCat-2.0 under free models"; Meituan's post drew 10K views), and the docs now include a dedicated Cline setup page. Sources: X – Status , X – Status
- Harness surface grew to 13 documented tools: setup guides now cover Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, CatPaw (Meituan's agent platform), Cline, Kilo Code, Cherry Studio, Chatbox, CodeBuddy (Tencent), OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, CC Switch, and WorkBuddy. Source: Meituan – Tools Overview
- Research release: LongCat-DeepResearch (Sep 30, MIT-licensed harness plus technical report) pairs a LongCat-2.0-based deep-research model with an open harness that tops ChatGPT-, Claude-, and Gemini-DeepResearch on all three public benchmarks; model improvements are slated for the next general-purpose LongCat release. Source: Meituan-Longcat – Longcat Deepresearch
- Inference infrastructure: two new repos, omni-flow (unified workflow orchestration and distributed KV-cache sharing for multimodal inference) and omni-flow-sglang (SGLang integration), went public Sep 3-4. Source: GitHub – Meituan Longcat
- Pricing unchanged: the August discounted rates were re-verified as current for both models: $0.30 uncached input / $0.006 cached input / $1.20 output per MTok (¥2/¥0.04/¥8 in China). Source: Meituan – Longcat 2.0
- Non-coding release: WBench, a multi-turn benchmark for interactive video world models, was published Sep 24 (241 stars), outside the coding scope but confirming org activity. Source: GitHub – Wbench
Plans
Meituan sells no seat-based subscription plans. What exists on the LongCat API Platform:
| Surface | Price | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| LongCat Web / App chat | $0 | Free chat with LongCat models on longcat.ai/chat; no published usage limits. Source: Meituan |
| API Pay-As-You-Go | $0.30/$1.20 per MTok (limited-time) | Prepaid balance, never expires, deducted per successful request; card/Google Pay (international) or Alipay/WeChat Pay (China). Source: Meituan – Api Pay As You Go |
| Token Pack | undisclosed (login-gated flash sales) | Fixed token quota valid 30 days; sold at 10:00/16:00/21:00/23:00 Beijing Time while stock lasts; cache hits free; refundable if unused. Source: Meituan – Token Pack |
| Enterprise tier | discount on PAYG | Via Enterprise Verification: 10% off at $75/month cumulative spend, 20% at $300, 30% at $1,200, 40% at $6,000; plus invoicing and "dedicated services" for large consumers. Source: Meituan – Faq |
| Self-host | $0 license | LongCat-2.0 weights under MIT; GPU deployment via SGLang cookbook, NPU deployment via SGLang-FluentLLM. Source: Hugging Face – Longcat 2.0 |
Terms explained:
- Token Pack - see Key Terms; the docs' Tools page calls it a "subscription" but it is a 30-day prepaid quota, not a recurring plan. Source: Meituan – Token Pack
- Flash sale - packs are only purchasable in four daily windows and can sell out; prices are not published outside the logged-in console. Source: Meituan – Token Pack
API Pricing
First-party API (base URLs Longcat – Openai and Longcat – Anthropic both models on both endpoints):
| Model | Uncached Input ($/MTok) | Cached Input ($/MTok) | Output ($/MTok) | Context | Max Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LongCat-2.5-Preview | $0.30 (limited-time) | $0.006 | $1.20 (limited-time) | 1M | 128K |
| LongCat-2.0 | $0.30 (limited-time) | $0.006 | $1.20 (limited-time) | 1M | 128K |
China-site prices are ¥2 uncached input / ¥0.04 cached / ¥8 output per MTok. Only successful (HTTP 200) requests are billed. Sources: Meituan – Api Pay As You Go , Meituan – Longcat 2.5 , Meituan – Platform
Verified partner/inference-provider pricing:
| Provider | Model | Input ($/MTok) | Cache Read ($/MTok) | Output ($/MTok) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter (endpoint: AtlasCloud, FP8) | meituan/longcat-2.0 | $0.30 | $0.006 | $1.20 | 1,048,756-token context, 262,144 max completion, tool_choice auto only, 100% endpoint uptime over the last day at time of fetch; listed Jul 20, 2026. Artificial Analysis indexes via OpenRouter: coding index 45.3. Source: Openrouter – Endpoints |
Terms explained:
- Tool_choice auto only - the OpenRouter endpoint accepts the
toolsparameter but onlyautotool selection;required/functionmodes are not supported, which matters for forced-call agent workflows. Source: Openrouter – Endpoints - 429 rate limiting - the first-party API enforces per-key rate limits and returns HTTP 429 with
retry_after: 60; no RPM/TPM thresholds are published. Source: Meituan – Platform
Model Performance / Benchmarks
LongCat-2.0 (published scores; all in-house under a unified harness unless marked *, cited from the compared model's official report):
| Benchmark | LongCat-2.0 | Gemini 3.1 Pro | GPT-5.5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (agentic coding) | 70.8 | 70.7* | 73.8* | 78.9* |
| SWE-bench Pro | 59.5 | 54.2* | 58.6* | 69.2* |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 77.3 | 76.9* | not reported | 84.8* |
| FORTE (general agent) | 73.2 | 70.3 | 77.8 | 77.2 |
| BrowseComp | 79.9 | 85.9* | 84.4* | 84.3* |
| GPQA-diamond | 88.9 | 94.3* | 93.6* | 92.4 |
Source: Hugging Face – Longcat 2.0
LongCat-DeepResearch (system-level, full benchmarks, deployed Deep Research products compared with native tools; Gemini 3.7 Flash, GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh, Claude Opus 5 xhigh as the compared backbones):
| Benchmark | LongCat-DeepResearch | ChatGPT-DeepResearch | Claude-DeepResearch | Gemini-DeepResearch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepResearchBench | 55.25 | 54.95 | 53.43 | 50.21 |
| DeepResearchBench II | 51.35 | 47.16 | 48.18 | 46.72 |
| ResearchRubrics | 79.83 | 74.21 | 72.91 | 64.92 |
Ablation: previous LongCat + old ReAct harness scored 47.65/33.13/60.33; previous model + new harness 53.58/48.68/71.90; current model + new harness 55.25/51.35/79.83, showing model and harness gains are complementary. On the in-house benchmark it scores 76.04, 0.55 below ChatGPT-DeepResearch. Source: Meituan-Longcat – Longcat Deepresearch
LongCat-2.5-Preview: no published coding benchmarks. The Sep 25 changelog entry and pricing pages contain no benchmark table, model card, or parameter count. Source: Meituan – Change Log
Latest News
LongCat-2.5-Preview launch (September 25, 2026)
New preview model on the API platform: multimodal understanding (image parsing, cross-modal Q&A, visual reasoning), "superior coding capability," and compatibility with Claude Code, Hermes, OpenClaw, OpenCode, and Kilo Code. Priced at the same limited-time $0.30/$1.20 per MTok as 2.0; 1M context and 128K max output per the quick-start docs; no weights or benchmarks published. Source: Meituan – Change Log
Enterprise Services rollout (September 2 China / September 10 international, 2026)
Enterprise Verification (KYC via legal-representative face check or corporate bank transfer in China; org details plus optional documents internationally), self-service invoicing, and tiered pay-as-you-go discounts up to 40% off monthly spend above $6,000 (international) or ¥40,000 (China). API keys: up to 100 active per account, 200 lifetime. Source: Meituan – Change Log
LongCat-2.0 free in Cline (September 1-2, 2026)
Cline announced LongCat-2.0 as a free model option ("1.6T open weights MoE model with 1M context... scoring similar to Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro"), selectable under free models via npm i -g cline then /model; Meituan amplified it the next day (10K views on X). Source: X – Status
LongCat-DeepResearch (September 30, 2026)
MIT-licensed research harness (Python standard library only, backend contract of llm/web_search/web_fetch you implement yourself) plus technical report; the paired LongCat-2.0-based model tops all three public deep-research benchmarks against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Deep Research. Weights, datasets, rubrics, trajectories, and training code are not released; improvements feed the next general-purpose LongCat model. Source: GitHub – Longcat Deepresearch
omni-flow open-sourced (September 3-4, 2026)
omni-flow (36 stars) is a unified workflow orchestration and distributed KV-cache-sharing framework for multimodal inference, with an Apache-2.0 SGLang integration repo following a day later; evidence Meituan is productizing its own inference stack. Source: GitHub – Meituan Longcat
Community Signals
September produced essentially no Hacker News engagement with LongCat or Meituan AI. The only on-topic submission in the search window (Aug 15 to report date) was the Cline free-access story at 1 point and 0 comments: News – Item . The "meituan" HN query for the same window returns methane-emissions news noise, confirming zero relevant discussion. Reddit search for LongCat was blocked by a login wall this cycle and could not be used.
For context, the most recent high-engagement LongCat discussion remains the June 30 launch thread (281 points, 88 comments): News – Item . Durable themes from it that still hold in September:
- Hardware sovereignty was the story, not the model. doctorpangloss: "The training and deployment of LongCat-2.0 are built on large-scale clusters of tens of thousands of AI ASIC superpods... This is the real news story. It looks like they may have used Huawei Ascend 910C chips." News – Item
- Independent spot-testing was unimpressed. credit_guy tested a niche physics question and ranked: "Overall I rate Gemini Flash the best, Qwen 3.7 Plus an acceptable second, and LongCat-2.0 an ok'ish third, if you have nothing better." News – Item
- Censorship concerns on politically sensitive queries. dwa3592: "I asked about tiananmen square and it said 'Too many requests, try again later' - this was my first question. I understand this is one data point but still ;/" News – Item . mlmonkey got a similar refusal asking about deaths under Mao: "Hello, I can't answer this question at the moment. Let's switch topics and chat about something else." News – Item
- Open-weight skepticism that later resolved. tcper on launch day: "Nothing can be downloaded from their Huggingface, and given this company's consistent track record, it can basically be considered a scam" (weights did ship, under MIT, on Jul 8). News – Item
The one fresh September community data point is the Cline promotion itself: Cline's tweet frames LongCat-2.0 as "scoring similar to Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro," a supplier-amplified capability claim with no independent September verification. X – Status
Reddit recovery (added 2026-10-03)
A logged-out Reddit recovery pass (October 3) found one relevant thread: r/SillyTavernAI (185 upvotes, 35 comments, ~Sep 25): "Longcat 2.5 Preview is live" Reddit – Longcat 25 Preview Is Live , showing the launch registered in the local-model community rather than coding circles; the rest of the query's top results were cat memes. No LongCat-specific subreddit exists.
Enterprise Readiness
| Feature | Available? | Details |
|---|---|---|
| SSO (SAML/OIDC) | No | Login is phone number or email only; no SSO mentioned in docs or FAQ. Source: Meituan – Faq |
| SCIM | No | No user provisioning features documented. Source: Meituan – Faq |
| Audit logs | No | Usage and billing records exist per account, but no org-level audit log product. Source: Meituan – Api Pay As You Go |
| IP indemnity | No | Not mentioned in any docs, terms, or model card; MIT weights explicitly grant no trademark/patent rights. Source: Hugging Face – Longcat 2.0 |
| Data residency | No | No residency options documented; platform operated by Beijing Kuxun Interactive Technology Co., Ltd. (Meituan subsidiary) under Chinese ICP registration. Source: Meituan |
| HIPAA | No | Not mentioned anywhere in the docs. Source: Meituan – Faq |
| Air-gapped / on-prem | Partial | MIT-licensed LongCat-2.0 weights can be self-hosted on GPU (SGLang cookbook) or NPU (SGLang-FluentLLM), but there is no supported on-prem product, and 2.5-Preview has no weights. Source: Hugging Face – Longcat 2.0 |
| SLA | No | No published uptime or latency SLA on any docs page; the OpenRouter endpoint showed 100% uptime over the prior day, but that is the partner's metric. Source: Meituan – Platform |
| Admin controls (RBAC) | No | Enterprise Verification unlocks invoices and volume discounts only; no teams, roles, or spend controls documented. Source: Meituan – Faq |
Terms explained:
- Enterprise Verification - organizational KYC, not access management: it proves the org's identity (and in China enables VAT special invoices) but creates no admin console, seats, or role model. Source: Meituan – Faq
Transparency Gaps
| Gap | Details | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| "Limited-time" pricing with no anchor | Both models bill $0.30/$1.20 per MTok "limited-time" with no end date and no undiscounted list price anywhere, so budgets cannot model a post-promo state. | High |
| LongCat-2.5-Preview has no technical disclosure | No benchmarks, no model card, no parameter count, no weights; capability claims ("major leaps") rest on marketing copy. | High |
| Rate limits unpublished | 429s exist with retry_after: 60, but no RPM/TPM/concurrency numbers per key or tier are documented. |
High |
| Token Pack prices hidden | Pack pricing is visible only in logged-in flash-sale windows (4x daily, Beijing time); quantities and stock levels are also opaque. | Medium |
| Cache TTL undefined | Cached input bills at $0.006/MTok but no cache hit-rate definition, TTL, or write surcharge is documented. | Medium |
| DeepResearch claims not reproducible | The 55.25/51.35/79.83 system scores depend on a model that is not released and hidden rubrics/datasets that are excluded from the repo, so only the harness is verifiable. | Medium |
| No enterprise security surface | No SSO, SCIM, audit logs, data residency, or SLA documentation; Enterprise Verification is KYC plus discounts. | Medium |
| Censorship behavior undocumented | Community reports of refusals on politically sensitive topics (June thread) have no corresponding policy or behavior documentation from Meituan. | Low |