Black Forest Labs launches Flux.2 AI image models to challenge Nano Banana Pro and Midjourney

It's not just Google's Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro, and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 we have to be thankful for this year around the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S.

No, today the German AI startup Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2, a new image generation and editing system complete with four different models designed to support production-grade creative workflows.

FLUX.2 introduces multi-reference conditioning, higher-fidelity outputs, and improved text rendering, and it expands the company’s open-core ecosystem with both commercial endpoints and open-weight checkpoints.

While Black Forest Labs previously launched with and made a name for itself on open source text-to-image models in its Flux family, today's release includes one fully open-source component: the Flux.2 VAE, available now under the Apache 2.0 license.

Four other models of varying size and uses — Flux.2 [Pro], Flux.2 [Flex], and Flux.2 ...