Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Image Klein on October 15, 2026, a small open-weight member of its FLUX 3 family. The image generator has 5.6 billion parameters (11.2GB in BF16, 5.6GB in FP8), and BFL released both a base model for fine-tuning and a step-distilled model for low latency, in FP8, INT8 and NVFP4 builds. Weights are on Hugging Face under the FLUX Kommunity License, which allows free commercial use for individuals and companies with under $5 million in annual revenue.
BFL says the distilled INT8 build generates a 1-megapixel image in about 4 seconds on an RTX 5090 and under 9 seconds on an RTX 4070, and runs on GeForce RTX GPUs with as little as 8GB of VRAM. Through the BFL API, as flux-3-image-klein, it starts at $0.009 per image. It supports up to 10 reference images, native 4K output and bounding-box control over where things are placed or edited.
In BFL’s internal evaluations it ranks first among open-weight models in text-to-image, multi-reference generation and editing, and gains 91 Elo in text-to-image and 70 in editing over the 9B FLUX.2 Klein while using 38 percent fewer parameters. External partner Cinder did safety testing.
Why it matters: it continues the trend of small open image models closing the gap on large ones, putting current-generation image generation and editing on a mid-range consumer graphics card.
What it does not show: the rankings and Elo gains are BFL’s internal evaluations, and the license is source-available with a revenue cap, not open source.