Cactus Releases Needle 2 Agentic LLM for IoT and Edge Devices
Cactus has released Needle 2, a 14MB, 45M-parameter agentic LLM designed for tool calling and structured extraction on constrained hardware including microcontrollers, wearables, and sub-$200 phones. For defenders, this closes a meaningful gap in on-device AI processing — enabling local inference without cloud data egress across the 21 billion IoT devices that previously had no viable on-device LLM option. Residual gaps remain around model governance at the edge, supply chain integrity for open-weight deployments, and the absence of standardised monitoring frameworks for agentic tool-calling on headless devices.