NVIDIA ships a 30B Nemotron for agent sub-tasks plus an open router that cuts cost to roughly a third of Opus 4.8

Announced 11 August 2026: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts open model aimed at specialised steps inside multi-agent systems, claiming up to 4x faster output and 30% faster agentic task completion against its class. NeMo Switchyard is an open-source routing library for popular agent tools that NVIDIA says brings task cost to nearly a third of running Opus 4.8 alone at frontier-level accuracy; partner runs showed 21–58% cost reductions against 6–28% accuracy tradeoffs. Weights are on Hugging Face, ModelScope, OpenRouter and build.nvidia.com; Switchyard is on GitHub.

What it means The stated tradeoff is published rather than hidden — 21–58% cheaper for 6–28% less accurate is a decision a team can actually take per sub-task instead of per product.