IBM: Granite 4.1 8B

The ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b row left the OpenRouter catalog in the 2026-09-05 snapshot, one day after it was last listed — active, with no expiry date and no warning in the row itself. A live fetch of the catalog, as observed on 5 September 2026 (https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models, 431 rows), confirmed the withdrawal: no granite-4.1 row of any kind survived, while ibm-granite/granite-4.0-h-micro and ibm-granite/granite-4.2-8b were both still listed. Nothing below is a current price or context window: the row's last listing was 2026-09-04, and nothing has refreshed it since.

The model is not retired. IBM still publishes the weights: the Hugging Face repository ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b is public, ungated, not disabled and Apache-2.0 licensed, and the Hub API reports it last modified 2026-05-04 (fetched 2026-09-05). Its model card names no deprecation, no successor and no sunset date — it does not contain the string "4.2" anywhere.

It was not renamed either, and that near-miss is worth naming because the slug invites it. IBM: Granite 4.2 8B is a different model, not this one under a new id. The two rows sat in the OpenRouter catalog beside each other on 2026-09-04; their canonical slugs are ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-20260429 and ibm-granite/granite-4.2-8b-20260831; and Hugging Face records 4.2's base_model as ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-base — a finetune of this model's base, which makes it a successor generation rather than a new name for the same thing. OpenRouter agrees on its own page for the withdrawn row (openrouter.ai/ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b, fetched 2026-09-05), whose embedded model data carries "aliasTarget":null and "deprecationDate":null — the router neither pointed the slug at a replacement nor published a deprecation for it.

What the disappearance records is that no provider serves the model through this router any more. The model still resolves at …/models/ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b/endpoints and returns its metadata with an empty endpoints array. That is the delisting signature: the record survives, the supply is gone. Granite is still served through the router by Cloudflare (4.0 Micro) and by DeepInfra and CoreWeave (4.2 8B) (fetched 2026-09-06), and DeepInfra's own catalog (https://api.deepinfra.com/models/list, fetched 2026-09-05) lists three Granite models — 4.2 3B, 4.2 8B and 4.2 30B — with no 4.1 among them.

Which provider carried 4.1 8B before it went, and why it stopped, neither party publishes. The empty endpoints array is a current state, not a history, and nothing on OpenRouter's page for the row or in IBM's model card explains the withdrawal. So this page records a delisting by one router of a model its publisher still ships, and does not guess at a cause. The feeds: binding is kept: if the row ever re-lists, it binds straight back to this entry.