Import AI 450: China Releases MERLIN — Military Electronic Warfare AI Model That Outperforms GPT-5 and Claude-4-Sonnet

Import AI·high signal

Jack Clark's Import AI 450 reports that Chinese researchers with military affiliations have built and released MERLIN (Multi-modal Electromagnetic Robust Learning), trained to handle low-signal-to-noise-ratio signals encountered in electronic warfare environments. MERLIN outperforms every frontier model tested — including GPT-5, Claude-4-Sonnet, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, Qwen3-Next-80b-A3B, and Gemini-2.5-Pro — by wide margins on reasoning tasks, with only Qwen-VL-4B-Instruct competitive on perception tasks. A significant milestone in domain-specific military AI capability from an open research publication.