Publication status

Available, Preview or RDI. This says whether your hardware and software can be bought today, and is independent of which division you submitted in.

The policy repository wins

This page summarises policy in submitter language. It does not restate it. Where this page and mlcommons/endpoints_policies disagree, the policy repository is correct and this page is a bug. Please report it.

The categories are defined in Submission Rules §7. In short (§7.1):

Category	Hardware	Software
Available	All performance-determining components pass the four-point test at submission time	Available software stack
Preview	Not yet Available; you commit to Available within 180 days	Available, except software supporting substantially new hardware
RDI	Meets neither	Meets neither

RDI has a cooling-off period

An RDI component can't come back as Available or Preview until the later of two cohorts after the RDI submission or 221 days after first publication as RDI (RDI Cooling-Off Period). Don't use RDI as a way to publish early.

Available: the four-point test

Pricing, shipment to a third party, public evidence that it ships today, and reasonable availability to other buyers, for every component that substantially determines performance, judged on the balance of evidence (§7.2).

Proof of shipment, not announcement

Announcements don't count

Keynotes, "coming soon" pages, soft-launch press releases and catalogue previews are not sufficient on their own. What does count is listed in §7.2.1.

Your own GA definition also binds you

If your organisation has a formal internal definition of general availability, the submitted system has to meet it as well as the rules' criteria (§7.2.1).

Reasonably available

No blocking competitors and no "early access" gating; supply and lead times aren't governed by the rules (§7.2.2). Reproducing an MLPerf result gives no one a priority allocation.

Available software stack

Each category of software (frameworks, inference servers, compute libraries, drivers, quantization tools, OS patches) has its own availability rule in §7.2.3, along with when a labelled beta qualifies. Private binary drops and private kernel patches don't. Your own submission code isn't part of the stack; it goes in your source package.

Available models

Weights under a licence that prohibits commercial deployment can't be Available (§7.2.4).

Division-specific additions

Standardized CoN keeps its endpoint reachable for 90 days after publication; Serviced has to be at full GA tier on the same endpoint paying customers use, with terms that allow benchmarking; the RDI division is always RDI status (§7.2.5).

Preview, and its clock

You commit to Available within 180 days, counted from the cohort the result first appears in, and corrections don't reset it (§7.3, §7.3.1).

Declaring Preview

Set availability_status and target_availability_date in the system description, and name the unavailable components specifically. "Targeting H2 2026" isn't enough (§7.3.4).

Software waiver

The software-stack requirement is waived only for software that supports newly developed hardware (§7.3.2).

Performance continuity

The Available re-submission has to match the Preview result, with 5% allowed on throughput and no percentage band on latency (§7.3.3).

Expiry and extensions

With no Available re-submission and no extension, the Preview result is removed at the next cohort (§7.3.5).

One extension only

One extension of up to 60 days, requested at least 30 days before expiry (§7.3.6). A second is denied and the result is invalidated.

Transitioning to Available

A new Available submission through normal review, re-run if the configuration changed materially (§7.3.7).

Referencing Preview results

Always call them "MLPerf Endpoints Preview", with the standard footnote (§7.3.8).

Custom SKUs

A custom SKU can be Available if it has shipped, similar customers can buy it, and its differences are publicly documented (§7.5).

Hardware no comparable customer can order

Silicon in production at a hyperscaler but not orderable by any comparable customer is an open working-group item. Until decided, it defaults to RDI, with the 221-day cooling-off attached. Tracked upstream as [CUSTOM-SKU] (Open Question).

These rules are a working draft

MLPerf Endpoints v1.0 rules are on an active development branch. Sections marked [TENTATIVE], [WIP], [WG Open Item] or [WG Decision Required] upstream can still change. Before committing hardware time to a submission, read Open questions and WIP rules.

Last verified against: mlcommons/endpoints_policies@v1.0_rules_dev (6b0b1ef), 2026-09-24.