First vision-language model in orbit

Who claims it, in their own words, and what else was read.

Claimed for 16 April 2026

“On April 16, 2026, NAVI-Orbital achieved what is, to the authors' knowledge, the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multi-modal inference entirely onboard.”
The paper's author: the experimenter. Published 5 Jun 2026. NAVI-Orbital on YAM-9

Contested. Another source, read here, reports something that may be earlier or the same. Which is right turns on a definition or on a fact not stated.

Starcloud reported running a Gemma model in orbit in December 2025. Whether that model was given images is not stated in what was read, and the paper does not mention Starcloud.

Set against

“running and querying responses from Gemma, an open large language model from Google”
CNBC: a news report. Published 10 Dec 2025. Starcloud-1

What a status means

stands as worded Nothing read contradicts the claim in the scope its maker gave it.
contradicted An earlier dated source, read here, reports the same thing.
contested Another source, read here, reports something that may be earlier or the same. Which is right turns on a definition or on a fact not stated.
unchecked Recorded as made. No earlier claim was found, and none was searched for.
out of scope The claim is true or false of something that did not run in space.

Every first claimed