Bolt.new Debuts Forge to Empower Building with AI While Using Open Source Models

Bolt.new, the AI app builder, is debuting Bolt Forge, a research preview built to widen who gets to build software while using open-source models.

"With Forge, you forge your own products and businesses," said Eric Simons, co-founder and CEO of Bolt.new. "And by building, you're helping the world forge capable open-weight models. A year ago, a lot of these builders didn't have the purchasing power to do this at all. Arming them is the whole point." 

According to the company, the economics rest on an explicit trade: builders who opt in share their anonymized sessions, and that data goes to work at Arcee AI, one of the leading Western open-weight labs and the company behind the Trinity model family. Bolt.new has partnered with Arcee to help train a trillion-parameter-class open-weight model, and every session from the first Forge training window contributes to it. A signed data processing agreement governs every transfer. 

"When a model's weights are open, capability stops being something you rent," said Mark McQuade, co-founder and CEO of Arcee AI. "Models trained on Forge are released to the public, so anyone can download and run them, including the builders whose work made them better. Widening who gets to build software starts with widening who owns the models, and open-source models belong to everyone." 

Consent is built into the product rather than buried in the terms. A one-tap opt-in fires every time a builder switches into Forge.

Bolt.new anonymizes shared sessions before anything leaves its infrastructure, stripping sensitive and personal information, and validates the pipeline against seeded test data.

Builders can leave the program at any time, and teams and enterprise workspaces are excluded from Forge and from all data collection. 

The circle closes where the weights publish: what builders help train through this program, they can download, inspect, and run, like anyone else. The receipt for the trade is the model itself. 

Forge ships as a selectable mode in the model picker, and it runs frontier open-source models only: GLM 4.6 Flash, DeepSeek, and Kimi at launch, with new open-model releases landing in Forge as they drop.

Usage shows as a single monthly bar with no daily limits and a hard stop at 100%. Premium modes stay private and untouched. 

The research preview runs from September 14 to October 14, 2026. 

For more information about this news, visit https://bolt.new/.