{"paper":{"title":"Open-Weight LLMs Are Often Competitive with Commercial APIs for Political Science Text Classification","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"stat.AP","authors_text":"Hanno Hilbig","submitted_at":"2026-05-19T02:46:35Z","abstract_excerpt":"Can researchers use local open-weight models instead of commercial APIs for LLM text classification? Local models avoid marginal API charges, keep data on the researcher's machine, and make exact model versions easier to preserve. I benchmark five local models against four commercial API models on 34 political science classification tasks. Local models are often competitive, especially on simpler tasks. In a task-specific oracle comparison, local models match or exceed API performance on 9 tasks; on average, the best API model exceeds the best local model by 0.015 F1. The four strongest observ"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.19275","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.19275/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}