SAN FRANCISCO — Bolt.new, the AI app builder, today launched Bolt Forge, a research preview built to widen who gets to build software, and a bet on open-source models as the way to do it. Every individual Bolt.new Pro plan now includes 50X more usage on open models at no extra cost.
Price has been deciding who gets to build with AI. Plenty of people arrive at Bolt.new with an idea and the skill to see it through, and the cost of entry stops them there. Forge opens AI building to far more people.
“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.”
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 percent. Premium modes stay private and untouched.
The research preview runs from September 14 to October 14, 2026.
Bolt Forge is live today for individual Pro subscribers. More at bolt.new/forge.