IBM has released Granite 4.2, its first family of dense, decoder-only reasoning language models, in three sizes: 3B, 8B, and 30B parameters. Announced on August 25, 2026 with weights published under the Apache 2.0 license, the release gives every Granite model a switchable thinking mode and sends the two larger sizes through reinforcement learning inside real software-engineering, terminal, and web-search environments. In a technical walkthrough of the build, the Granite Team at IBM describes a…