Ethically trained AI startup Pleias releases new small reasoning models optimized for RAG with built-in citations

Now the company has announced the release of two open source small-scale reasoning models designed specifically for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), citation synthesis, and structured multilingual output. All appear to be available under a permissive Apache 2.0 open source license, meaning they are eligible for organizations to take, modify and deploy for commercial use cases. The Pleias-RAG model family is the latest effort to bridge the gap between accuracy and efficiency in small language models. These models are aimed at enterprises, developers, and researchers looking for cost-effective alternatives to large-scale language models without compromising traceability, multilingual capabilities, or structured reasoning workflows. On translated benchmark sets across French, German, Spanish, and Italian, the Pleias models show negligible degradation in performance.