A Chinese food delivery company just released one of the most capable coding AI models on the planet. And it did so at a fraction of what OpenAI and Anthropic charge for their flagship products.
Meituan, the Hong Kong-listed on-demand services giant best known for delivering dumplings and booking hotel rooms, unveiled LongCat-2.0 on June 30. The model scores 59.5 on SWE-bench Pro, a widely watched benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world software engineering tasks. That edges out GPT-5.5’s score of 58.6 and surpasses Claude Opus variants on the same test.
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone building with AI: the API pricing. LongCat-2.0 comes in at roughly $0.75 per million input tokens and $2.95 per million output tokens. If you’ve been watching what Western frontier models charge for comparable capability, those numbers look almost confrontational.
Built without a single Nvidia chip
LongCat-2.0 is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. In English: instead of running every calculation through the entire model, it routes each request to specialized sub-networks, activating only the parameters it needs.
