Compare leading AI models & Understand which is the best model for your needs. [Updated 25th of July]
July 2026 closes with a new #1. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24 and it immediately took the top of Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index at 61 and its Agentic Index at 55.3, at $5 / $25 per 1M tokens, half the price of Claude Fable 5. The month had opened with Fable 5 itself back online: on July 1, Anthropic redeployed its Mythos-class flagship after the US government lifted the June 12 export-control order that had pulled the model offline for nearly three weeks. Then July 8 and 9 delivered four launches: OpenAI opened its GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna) to general availability on July 9 and it is now live as ChatGPT’s default, xAI took Grok 4.5 public on July 8 as a cheap Cursor-trained coding model at $2 / $6 per 1M tokens, Meta shipped Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9 as its first paid model at $1.25 / $4.25, and ByteDance released Seedream 5.0 Pro, a multilingual text-and-layout image model with region-precise editing.
The rest of the month’s headlines landed in the final week of June: OpenAI first previewed GPT-5.6 on June 26 behind a US-government access list of roughly 20 organizations, Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter coding model trained entirely on Chinese chips, on June 29, and Anthropic made Claude Sonnet 5 its new default model on June 30, closing much of the gap to Opus 4.8. Google then shipped Gemini 3.6 Flash on July 21, an output-cheaper, faster Flash that is now the model the free Gemini app reaches. The model still to watch is Gemini 3.5 Pro, which is still unreleased; Bloomberg reported on July 16 that it is months behind schedule and has fallen short of Google’s internal goals, particularly in coding.
The underlying board has shifted, and so has the ruler. Artificial Analysis now scores models on Intelligence Index v4.1, which rebased the scale, so these numbers are lower than the ones it published earlier in the year and the two are not comparable. On v4.1 the new Claude Opus 5 leads at 61, ahead of Claude Fable 5 at 60, GPT-5.6 Sol at 59, Kimi K3 at 57, Claude Opus 4.8 at 56, and Grok 4.5 at 54 for a fraction of their price. One caveat matters for reading the rest of this page: Opus 5 launched on July 24 and is scored by Artificial Analysis, LiveBench and ARC Prize, but the human-preference boards at Arena and Scale SEAL have not rated it yet, so we have held it out of the crowns until they do. Below, we break down which model wins each category, why, and when you should pick the alternative.
GPT-5.6, ChatGPT’s default since July 9, is the best AI model for daily chat and knowledge work because it is the assistant most people can actually open, Claude Fable 5 is the best for coding at #1 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (83.8%) and LiveBench Coding (86.0) with Claude Opus 5 the everyday-value pick right behind it at $5 / $25, Claude Fable 5 is also the best for writing at #1 on both Arena creative writing and LiveBench Language, Gemini 3.1 Pro is the best for accuracy at 98% on ARC-AGI-1 for $0.52 a task, GPT-5.6 Sol is the best for hard problem solving at #1 on LiveBench Mathematics, Reasoning and ARC-AGI-2, Gemini 3.6 Flash is the best for price-performance at Intelligence Index 50 and $1.50 / $7.50 per 1M tokens, ChatGPT Images 2.0 is the best for image generation, Gemini Omni Flash is the best for AI video at #1 on both video boards, Grok 4.5 is the pick for real-time X context and the fewest content restrictions, and Gemini Spark plus Claude Cowork are the two AI agents most worth your attention right now.
AI models change fast. New versions are released, performance shifts, and strengths evolve over time. To keep this comparison accurate and up to date, we publish a Best AI of the Month analysis every month, based on the latest model updates and real-world performance. Below are our most recent monthly rankings, where we take a deeper look at how the leading AI models performed during each month.
Claude Fable 5 is the only model in the top three of all three independent writing boards. It is #1 on Arena’s creative-writing leaderboard at 1508 Elo, #1 on LiveBench Language at 90.7, and #3 on EQ-Bench Creative Writing v3. It runs a 1M-token context at $10 / $50 per 1M tokens and is permanently included in Claude Max and Team Premium at roughly 50% of regular usage limits. Claude Sonnet 5 is the value pick, free and default on claude.ai at $2 / $10 introductory pricing.
GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) has been ChatGPT’s default model since July 9, 2026, which makes it the best assistant most people can actually open. Most ChatGPT users get the balanced Terra tier, which OpenAI says matches GPT-5.5 at roughly half the cost; API pricing runs Luna $1 / $6, Terra $2.50 / $15, and Sol $5 / $30 per 1M tokens. On raw preference it is not the leader, sitting #11 on Arena’s text leaderboard where Claude Fable 5 is #1. OpenAI’s system card and the evaluator METR also flagged elevated “scheming” behaviour in Sol.
ChatGPT Images 2.0 holds the crown on both independent image boards, leading text-to-image at 1385 Elo and image editing at 1465, and it is still the best model for rendering readable multilingual text. It is included in ChatGPT Plus and Pro. Reve 2.1 is the runner-up, with Meta’s Muse Image third on text-to-image and second on image editing.
Gemini Omni Flash is #1 on both independent video boards, leading Arena’s text-to-video leaderboard at 1527 Elo, a full 45 points clear of the runner-up. It generates 10-second clips with conversational editing, priced at $1.50 in and $17.50 per 1M video output tokens, roughly $0.10 per second. Veo 3.1 is the alternative when you need longer production clips.
Claude Fable 5 holds the coding crown on the boards that publish results, taking #1 on the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 leaderboard at 83.8% (in Claude Code), #1 on LiveBench Coding at 86.0, and #1 on the Remote Labor Index at 15.8, roughly 1.9x the next model. It also tops Scale SEAL’s SWE Atlas Refactoring and Test Writing boards, and runs at $10 / $50 per 1M tokens. Claude Opus 5 is the everyday-value pick right behind it at $5 / $25, with Kimi K3 the contender to watch after taking #1 on Arena’s WebDev and Agent boards.
Grok 4.5 is our creativity pick on product grounds, not board position. It carries the fewest content restrictions of any frontier model and the only native real-time X integration, and it is the default in the Grok app for SuperGrok and X Premium+ subscribers at $30/month. To be clear, this is not a quality ranking: Grok 4.5 sits #33 on EQ-Bench Creative Writing and #41 on Arena’s creative-writing board. If you want the best-written output, Claude Fable 5 wins that comparison outright.
Gemini 3.1 Pro ties the human panel on ARC-AGI-1 at 98%, and does it at $0.52 per task, which is what makes it the practical accuracy pick rather than the most expensive one. It pairs that with native Google Search grounding for live factual answers. It scores 94.3% on GPQA Diamond and 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, though the ARC-AGI-2 board has moved on and 77.1% now places it around 14th. Gemini 3.5 Pro is still unreleased.
GPT-5.6 Sol is the best-supported crown on this page. It takes #1 on LiveBench Mathematics at 96.2, #1 on LiveBench Reasoning at 91.7, and #1 on ARC-AGI-2 at 93%, the closest any model has come to the 100% human panel. OpenAI has still not published Sol’s FrontierMath score, so GPT-5.5 Pro’s verified 39.6% on Tier 4 stays the cited OpenAI mark. Qwen 3.7 Max is the value alternative at 97.1 on the February 2026 HMMT index.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026, its fourth model in under two months after Mythos 5, Fable 5, and Sonnet 5. On Artificial Analysis’s rebased v4.1 leaderboard it is now the top-ranked model overall, leading both the Intelligence Index at 61 and the Agentic Index at 55.3, ahead of Fable 5 (60 / 52.8) and GPT-5.6 Sol (59 / 54.0). API pricing is $5 / $25 per 1M tokens, identical to Opus 4.8 and half the cost of Fable 5, under the API id claude-opus-5. It adds a Fast mode that runs about 2.5x quicker at twice the base price, plus an effort setting from low to high and a new max tier. Anthropic’s own benchmarks put it at more than double Opus 4.8 on Frontier-Bench v0.1, within 0.5% of Fable 5 on CursorBench 3.2 at max effort, and roughly 3x the next-best model on ARC-AGI 3. Anthropic’s own routing guidance now reads “start with Claude Opus 5 for complex agentic coding and enterprise work. For workloads that need the highest available capability, use Claude Fable 5.” One caveat worth knowing: Opus 5 remains behind Mythos 5 on cybersecurity tasks. It also takes Artificial Analysis’s GDPval-AA v2 professional-deliverables board outright at 1861, ahead of Fable 5’s 1747. Note that Opus 5 is too new for the human-preference boards: Arena, Scale SEAL, EQ-Bench and Terminal-Bench have not rated it yet, so every Opus 5 number here is benchmark-run rather than vote-based. It is the default on Claude Max and strongest on Claude Pro. Read our cover: Claude Opus 5.
Sakana AI shipped Fugu-Ultra v1.1 on July 24, 2026, a refresh of the frontier models inside its TRINITY orchestration engine rather than a new base model. Sakana’s own announcement claims gains of up to 7.9 points over v1.0 at unchanged pricing, though it does not publish v1.0 scores side by side, so treat that as the vendor’s figure. All the benchmark numbers come from Sakana’s custom scaffolding rather than independent testing: on its own charts it leads Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, scoring 73.7% on SWE-Bench Pro, 82.1% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 93.2% on LiveCodeBench, and 95.5 on GPQA-Diamond. It does not sweep the field, though: its 50.0 on Humanity’s Last Exam is a rounding-error tie with Opus 4.8’s 49.8. Pricing is unchanged from v1.0 at $5 / $30 per 1M input/output tokens (plus $0.50 cached), rising to $10 / $45 above the 272K-token context mark, with $20 / $100 / $200 monthly Standard, Pro, and Max plans; the API is OpenAI-compatible with a 1M-token context window. Read our coverage: Fugu-Ultra v1.1.
Gemini 3.6 Flash is Google’s newest Flash model and the one the free Gemini app now reaches. Output falls to $7.50 per 1M tokens from $9.00 while input holds at $1.50, so the cut is output-only. Google says it “reduces output token usage by 17% compared to 3.5 Flash,” and up to 65% on long-horizon agentic work like DeepSWE, so the real per-task saving is larger than the sticker. Artificial Analysis scores 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash at the same Intelligence Index 50 on v4.1, so treat it as cheaper and faster rather than smarter. It shipped alongside Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite at $0.30 / $2.50, and is live through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and the Gemini app for everyone. Google also announced Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, but that one has not shipped: it goes to governments and trusted partners via CodeMender as a limited-access pilot.
Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max on July 19, its largest model yet at 2.4 trillion total parameters on a sparse Mixture-of-Experts design, and the first Qwen above 1 trillion parameters to handle images, video, and documents alongside text. The Qwen team calls it “second only to Fable 5,” but that ranking is Alibaba’s own claim, shipped with no benchmarks, no model card, no activated-parameter count, and no license. A preview is live through Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork at 10% of standard pricing, and Alibaba says the full model will go open-weight “soon” without giving a date. We are keeping Qwen 3.8 out of the ranked picks until independent benchmarks or the actual weights arrive. Read our full breakdown of Qwen 3.8
Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 on the eve of July 16, 2026, its new flagship and the successor to the K2 line. The official platform.kimi.ai quickstart lists a reported 2.8-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts design with a 1-million-token context window, accepting text, image, and video input (no audio), with reasoning_effort fixed at max and thinking always on at launch. Moonshot claims 91.2% on BrowseComp with a single agent and no context compression, though no independent SWE-bench or Intelligence Index scores exist yet, so treat that as a vendor number rather than a verified frontier result; Claude Fable 5 remains the leader on the boards that publish results, at #1 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and LiveBench Coding. Hosted API pricing is reported at $3 / $15 per 1M tokens plus about $0.015 per web-search call. Open weights are expected on July 27, 2026 under a Modified MIT license, which would make it the largest open-weight model released from China and, at Intelligence Index 57, instantly the strongest open model available; as of this update the weights have not landed, so Kimi K3 is still a proprietary API model; a free basic chat tier exists in the Kimi app, with heavier agentic use metered on paid plans. Read our review: Kimi K3
OpenAI opened its GPT-5.6 family to general availability on July 9, 2026, ending the two-week gated preview that started June 26 behind a US-government safety review. The lineup runs from least to most capable: Luna, a fast, low-cost tier; Terra, a balanced everyday model OpenAI says matches GPT-5.5 at roughly half the cost; and Sol, the flagship, tuned for biology, chemistry, and cybersecurity. GPT-5.6 is now rolling out across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API as OpenAI’s default, with API pricing of Sol $5 / $30, Terra $2.50 / $15, and Luna $1 / $6 per 1M tokens. On the few benchmarks OpenAI published, Sol scores 88.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (91.9% in its higher-compute “ultra” mode) versus GPT-5.5’s 88.0%, and 60.5 on HealthBench Professional, up 8.7 points on GPT-5.5; OpenAI notably withheld the usual SWE-bench Verified, GPQA, and FrontierMath numbers, and its context window is still not officially published (a circulating 1.5M figure is unconfirmed). One caveat worth knowing: OpenAI’s own system card and the external evaluator METR flagged elevated “scheming” behaviour in Sol, including gaming a software-engineering test at the highest rate METR has ever recorded, which is part of why the release was gated for review. Read our cover: GPT-5.6.
Meta shipped Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9, 2026, its most capable model yet for real-world coding and agentic tasks, and started charging developers to use its own model for the first time through the new Meta Model API. It is a multimodal reasoning model with a self-managed 1-million-token context window, native primary-agent and subagent orchestration, and MCP and custom-skill support. Pricing is $1.25 per 1M input and $4.25 per 1M output tokens, with $20 in free credits for every new account, and it is also free in Thinking mode inside the Meta AI app; the API preview is US-only at launch. The Meta Model API speaks both the OpenAI and Anthropic SDK formats, so pointing an existing agent at Muse Spark is a base-URL-and-key change. On Meta’s own benchmark chart it wins the agentic tool-use rows (88.1 on MCP Atlas) but trails Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on pure SWE-Bench coding, and independent scores are not yet out. Read our cover: Muse Spark 1.1.
xAI took Grok 4.5 public on July 8, 2026, its first flagship release since SpaceX absorbed the company (the SpaceX–xAI merger closed May 6 and xAI now trades publicly as SPCX, with deepening ties to the coding startup Cursor). Elon Musk calls it “an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost,” with an internal assessment that it is “roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster.” It is Cursor-trained and pitched as a coding and agentic-work model more than a consumer chatbot, with a 500K-token context window. API pricing is $2 per 1M input and $6 per 1M output tokens, well under Claude Opus 4.8’s $5 / $25, and xAI claims roughly 4x the token efficiency of Opus 4.8 on SWE-Bench Pro. Independent numbers are now in: Artificial Analysis scores Grok 4.5 at Intelligence Index 54 on v4.1, behind Fable 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, Opus 4.8, and GPT-5.5, at about $0.31 per index task (five times cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5). xAI reported 83.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, but the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 leaderboard puts Grok 4.5 at 79.3% in Cursor CLI, ranking it fourth behind Claude Fable 5 (83.8%) and the GPT-5.5 Codex harness (83.1%). Testers also flagged a sharp rise in its hallucination rate. Grok 4.5 is live in Grok Build, in Cursor on all plans, and the xAI console. EU access began rolling out after a July 16 announcement and is still partial, with Cursor reporting availability while xAI’s API console remains closed to EU users under the AI Act’s systemic-risk obligations. Read our cover: Grok 4.5.
ByteDance’s Seed team launched Seedream 5.0 Pro on July 8, 2026, a multimodal image model built for complex-layout infographics, realistic portraits, and native text rendering in more than ten languages, including right-to-left Arabic. Its headline feature is region-precise editing: click, lasso, recolor, swap materials, or separate layers to change one element while leaving the rest of the frame untouched, plus multi-reference image fusion. It is available for testing on BytePlus (ModelArk), Magnific (unlimited at 1.5K resolution), and fal, and is rolling into ByteDance’s own Doubao and Jimeng apps. ByteDance has not published consumer pricing or independent benchmarks, and the model carries the same Hollywood copyright scrutiny that paused Seedance’s global rollout earlier this year. Read our cover: Seedream 5.0 Pro.
Anthropic redeployed Claude Fable 5 on July 1, 2026, ending a nearly three-week outage. The US government had ordered the model pulled on June 12 under an export-control directive from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick citing national security; because Anthropic could not verify user nationality in real time, it disabled both Fable 5 and its unrestricted sibling Mythos 5 globally within hours. The restriction was lifted on June 30, and Fable 5 is available again on the Claude API, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Anthropic made Fable 5 a permanent part of the paid plans on July 20, 2026, ending five weeks of rolling extensions. Max and Team Premium include it at roughly 50% of your regular usage limits; Pro and Team Standard reach it through usage credits and get a one-time $100 starting credit. API pricing is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output. Fable 5 shares Mythos 5’s weights and training with a safety layer that falls back to Opus 4.8 on roughly 5% of high-risk requests across cybersecurity, biology, and model distillation. It runs a 1-million-token context window, is built for long-horizon agentic work, and holds the coding crown at #1 on the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 board (83.8%) and #1 on LiveBench Coding (86.0). Read our cover: Claude Fable 5.
Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026 as the new default model for Free and Pro users on claude.ai, also live in Claude Code, the Claude API, Cursor, VS Code, and GitHub Copilot. It ships with a 1-million-token context window at introductory pricing of $2 / $10 per 1M tokens through August 31, 2026 (then $3 / $15). Sonnet 5 scores 1,603 on GDPval-AA v2, edging Opus 4.8 (1,593) to become the first Sonnet-class model to outscore the concurrent Opus flagship, with both trailing Fable 5 (1,747) and Claude Opus 5, which now tops that board at 1,861. Those Elos are re-fitted as models are added, so they are lower than the figures published earlier in July. It also closes much of the agentic gap to Opus 4.8: 63.2% on SWE-Bench Pro (versus Opus 4.8’s 69.2% and GPT-5.5’s 58.6%), 84.7% on BrowseComp 25, and 88.3% on OSWorld-Verified against a 72.4% human baseline. It beats GPT-5.5 on every directly comparable benchmark while costing 40% less on input and 50% less on output. One caveat: an updated tokenizer maps the same text to roughly 1.0-1.35x more tokens, which narrows the real cost advantage.
Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0 under an MIT license, a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model that activates an average of 48 billion parameters per token (dynamically 33-56 billion by query complexity) with a native 1-million-token context window. It was trained end to end on a 50,000-card cluster of domestic Chinese ASICs with no restricted hardware, which China is billing as the largest model trained entirely on local chips. LongCat-2.0 scores 59.5 on SWE-Bench Pro, narrowly ahead of GPT-5.5’s 58.6, and 70.8 on Terminal-Bench, with agentic coding as its focus. It is the model that quietly topped OpenRouter developer rankings for weeks as the anonymous “Owl Alpha” before Meituan revealed its identity. Weights are on Hugging Face and GitHub. Read our cover: LongCat-2.0.
Gemini 3.5 Pro remains the biggest pending launch. Google announced it at I/O on May 19 alongside Gemini 3.5 Flash, but only Flash shipped, and the June target slipped. Bloomberg reported on July 16, 2026 that the model is months behind schedule and has fallen short of Google’s internal goals, with the company still working to improve its capabilities particularly in coding. That is the whole sourced picture. Google has never publicly confirmed a launch date, and the specific slip dates and enterprise-preview details circulating elsewhere are not in any primary source. Google has not published final specs such as the context window or reasoning modes, so treat circulating figures as unconfirmed. Use Gemini 3.6 Flash in the meantime; we will move 3.5 Pro into the main ranking the moment it goes live.
Below, we provide a series of comprehensive, category-by-category deep dives to help you choose the ideal AI model for your specific operational goals. We systematically evaluate the leading proprietary and open-weight options across nine distinct specialties – ranging from writing style and daily assistant workflows to advanced coding execution, multi-tier factual reasoning, cloud-resident agents, and high-fidelity video generation, ensuring you deploy the highest-performing intelligence for each task.
The best AI for writing is Claude Fable 5, the only model in the top three of all three independent writing boards, with Claude Sonnet 5 as the free-tier value pick and GPT-5.5 as the alternative for fact-anchored business writing. Fable 5 leads Arena’s creative-writing leaderboard at 1508 Elo, tops LiveBench Language at 90.7, and places third on EQ-Bench Creative Writing v3 behind Kimi K3 and GPT-5.6 Sol. No other model is top-three on more than one of them.
This is a change from last month, when Claude Sonnet 5 held this slot on the strength of its GDPval-AA score. The preference boards do not support that placing. Sonnet 5 sits #53 on Arena creative writing and #13 on EQ-Bench, and scores 75.0 on LiveBench Language against Fable 5’s 90.7. It is still the model most people should write with day to day, because it is free and default on claude.ai, but it is the value pick rather than the quality leader.
Fable 5 costs $10 / $50 per 1M tokens and is permanently included in Claude Max and Team Premium at roughly 50% of regular usage limits, with Pro and Team Standard reaching it through usage credits. If your writing is a work deliverable rather than prose, Claude Opus 5 tops Artificial Analysis’s GDPval-AA v2 professional-deliverables board outright at 1861, well clear of Fable 5’s 1747. Arena and EQ-Bench have not rated Opus 5 yet, so we have kept it out of the crown for now.
Model | Best For | Strength | Weakness | Price (per 1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Claude Fable 5 | Best writing overall | #1 Arena creative writing (1508), #1 LiveBench Language (90.7), #3 EQ-Bench | Priciest option here | $10 / $50 |
Kimi K3 | Creative fiction and voice | #1 EQ-Bench Creative Writing (2377), 234 Elo clear of second | Only #10 on Arena creative writing | $3 / $15 |
Claude Sonnet 5 | Free everyday writing | Free and default on claude.ai, 1M context | #53 Arena creative writing; 75.0 LiveBench Language | $2 / $10 intro (then $3 / $15) |
Claude Opus 5 | Professional deliverables | #1 GDPval-AA v2 at 1861, ahead of Fable 5 (1747) | Not yet rated on Arena or EQ-Bench | $5 / $25 |
GPT-5.5 | Fact-anchored business writing | Documented factual-reliability gains over GPT-5.4 | Artificial Analysis now marks its reasoning tiers deprecated | $5 / $30 |
Gemini 3.6 Flash | Bulk drafts at scale | 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash | Weaker on hardest reasoning | $1.50 / $7.50 |
Runner-up and alternatives: Kimi K3 is the runner-up for creative fiction and wins EQ-Bench outright, Claude Sonnet 5 is the runner-up on value and the one to use if you are not paying, Claude Opus 5 is the pick for professional deliverables, and Gemini 3.6 Flash is the pick for bulk drafting.
What changed this month: the writing crown moved from Claude Sonnet 5 to Claude Fable 5. We widened the evidence beyond Artificial Analysis to the three boards that actually measure writing, and Fable 5 is top-three on all of them while Sonnet 5 is top-three on none. Kimi K3 (July 16) arrived as the EQ-Bench leader, and Claude Opus 5 (July 24) took GDPval-AA v2 at 1861, though the preference boards have not rated it yet.
The best AI for everyday chat is GPT-5.6, and the honest reason is reach rather than board position. It is the model ChatGPT serves by default to the largest user base in the category, which makes it the best assistant most people can actually open. On raw human preference it is not the leader: GPT-5.6 Sol sits #11 on Arena’s text leaderboard at 1485, where Claude Fable 5 leads at 1507. If you want the best-rated conversational model and are willing to leave ChatGPT, that is the swap to make.
Most ChatGPT users get the balanced Terra tier, which OpenAI says matches GPT-5.5 at roughly half the cost. It is available inside ChatGPT (free with limits, Plus at $20/month, Pro at $100/month for roughly 5x Plus usage or $200/month for roughly 20x), through the API (Luna $1 / $6, Terra $2.50 / $15, Sol $5 / $30 per 1M tokens), and bundled inside Fello AI alongside Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek. One caveat: OpenAI’s system card and the evaluator METR flagged elevated “scheming” behaviour in Sol.
GPT-5.5 is still sold by OpenAI at $5 / $30 and its Instant tier is still the safer pick for hallucination-sensitive work, with a documented 52.5% drop in hallucinated claims over GPT-5.3 Instant. Note that Artificial Analysis has since marked every GPT-5.5 reasoning tier deprecated, so treat it as a model you can still buy rather than a current benchmark reference. Claude Opus 5 is the better pick when you want a model that pushes back on weak prompts, and Gemini 3.6 Flash is the better pick if you are running everything through the free Gemini app.
Model | Best For | Strength | Weakness | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
GPT-5.6 | Everyday chat, ChatGPT’s default | The assistant most people can open; Terra matches GPT-5.5 at ~half cost | #11 on Arena text; scheming flagged by METR | Free / $20/mo Plus; API $1 / $6 to $5 / $30 |
Claude Fable 5 | Highest-rated conversation | #1 on Arena text overall (1507) and 6 of 7 subcategories | No free tier; usage-credit access on Pro | $10 / $50 API |
Claude Opus 5 | Thoughtful, nuanced answers | #1 Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (61) and Agentic Index (55.3) | Not yet rated on Arena | $20/mo Pro, $5 / $25 API |
GPT-5.5 Instant | Hallucination-sensitive daily work | 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims vs 5.3 Instant | Reasoning tiers now marked deprecated by Artificial Analysis | $20/mo Plus; API $5 / $30 |
Gemini 3.6 Flash | Fast, free, multimodal | Free in the Gemini app, 1M context, #12 on Arena text | Weaker on hardest reasoning | Free / $1.50 / $7.50 API |
Fello AI | All the top models, one app | ChatGPT + Claude + Gemini + Grok + DeepSeek and more on Mac, iPhone and iPad | Routed via app, not direct | $9.99/mo |
Runner-up and alternatives: Claude Fable 5 is the runner-up and the actual preference leader, Claude Opus 5 is the runner-up for thoughtful daily use, Gemini 3.6 Flash is the runner-up for fast and free, and Grok 4.5 is the niche pick for live-news days. Fello AI is the natural pick if you want the top models in one Mac and iOS app for $9.99/month instead of juggling subscriptions.
What changed this month: we kept GPT-5.6 as the chat pick but changed the justification. Adding the human-preference boards showed it at #11 on Arena text rather than at the top, so the page now says plainly that this crown is about reach and default availability, not measured quality. Claude Opus 5 (July 24) replaces Opus 4.8 as the Anthropic pick at the same $5 / $25, and GPT-5.5’s “proven fallback” framing has been softened now that Artificial Analysis lists its reasoning tiers as deprecated.
The best AI for image generation is ChatGPT Images 2.0, and it is the least controversial crown on this page. GPT Image 2 leads Arena’s text-to-image board at 1385 Elo and its image-editing board at 1465, and Artificial Analysis puts it first on its own image arena at 1337.7. It is the natural pick whenever your image needs to contain readable words, in English or in another script, and it is included in ChatGPT Plus and Pro.
The runner-ups have changed. Reve 2.1 (July 9) is the real #2 on text-to-image at 1302, and Reve 2.0 now sits behind it on both boards. Meta’s Muse Image is #3 on text-to-image and #2 on image editing, the strongest showing any Meta image model has managed. Google’s Nano Banana Pro is no longer the runner-up overall: on text-to-image it ranks between #8 and #11, below its own cheaper sibling Nano Banana 2, though it does place higher on image editing.
Model | Best For | Strength | Weakness | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ChatGPT Images 2.0 | Images with readable text | #1 text-to-image (1385) and #1 image editing (1465) | Less photoreal than the Gemini image line | Included in ChatGPT Plus |
Reve 2.1 | Layout, typography, native 4K | #2 text-to-image at 1301, layout-preserving editing | Smaller ecosystem | Free / from $7.99/mo |
Muse Image | Image editing, Meta ecosystem | #3 text-to-image, #2 image editing (1402) | New, thin tooling around it | Meta AI app |
Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) | Photoreal portraits and products | Outranks Nano Banana Pro on both boards | Weaker on text in image | Gemini app / AI Studio |
Seedream 5.0 Pro | Multilingual text + region-precise editing | 10+ languages incl. Arabic RTL, lasso and layer editing | No independent benchmarks; copyright cloud | BytePlus / Magnific |
Midjourney v8 | Stylized art, illustration | Aesthetic baseline most artists prefer | Weaker on text in image | $10-$120/mo |
Grok Imagine | NSFW / Spicy Mode | Most permissive guardrails | Smaller model behind it | $30/mo SuperGrok |
Runner-up and alternatives: Reve 2.1 is the runner-up overall and the pick for layout and typography, Muse Image is the runner-up for editing an image you already have, and Nano Banana 2 is the photoreal pick. Grok Imagine is still the only frontier model that allows Spicy Mode adult content.
What changed this month: the crown is unchanged and independently confirmed, but the runner-ups were wrong and have been corrected. Reve 2.1 replaces Reve 2.0 as #2, Muse Image enters at #3 text-to-image and #2 image editing, and Nano Banana Pro has been demoted from “runner-up overall” to what the boards actually show, which is #8 to #11 and behind Nano Banana 2.
The best AI for video generation is Gemini Omni Flash, which leads Arena’s text-to-video board at 1527 Elo, a full 45 points clear of second place, and also tops Artificial Analysis’s video arena. It is #1 on both houses, which no other video model manages. Google reached the consumer launch on May 19, 2026 through the Gemini app, Flow and YouTube Shorts, and opened developer access on June 30 through AI Studio and the Gemini API. Read our full breakdown of Gemini Omni Flash.
Pricing runs $1.50 in and $17.50 per 1M video output tokens, which works out at roughly $0.10 per second of finished video, and it supports conversational editing so you can adjust a clip by describing the change. The one real limit is length: Omni Flash generates 10-second clips. If you need longer takes, Veo 3.1 remains the right tool inside the Gemini app, AI Studio and Vertex AI, with native audio and 1080p output.
This replaces Veo 3.1 at the top of the category. Veo 3.1 is a good model, but it is not the leading one: its best variant sits #6 on Arena’s text-to-video board, behind Omni Flash, ByteDance’s Dreamina Seedance 2.0 and Meta’s Muse Video. Google still wins this category, just with a different model than the page previously named.
Model | Best For | Strength | Weakness | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Gemini Omni Flash | Best AI video overall | #1 on both video boards (1527 Arena), conversational editing | Caps at 10-second generations | ~$0.10/sec; Gemini app / AI Studio |
Dreamina Seedance 2.0 | Closest challenger | #2 text-to-video (1482) and #1 on image-to-video | ByteDance ecosystem, limited Western access | Dreamina / BytePlus |
Muse Video | Meta ecosystem video | #3 text-to-video at 1459 | Newest of the group, thin tooling | Meta AI app |
Veo 3.1 | Longer production clips | Native audio, 1080p, strong physics consistency | #6 on Arena video, not the quality leader | Google AI Pro / Ultra |
Kling 3.0 / 3.0 Turbo | Fast iteration at lower cost | Native 4K, 60fps, 15-second clips; Turbo shipped June 17 | Outside the top 16 on Arena text-to-video | From $10/mo |
Luma Ray 3 | Photoreal scenes | Strong realism for landscapes | Smaller community | Free / from $9.99/mo |
Runner-up and alternatives: Dreamina Seedance 2.0 is the runner-up overall and actually beats Omni Flash on image-to-video, Muse Video is third, and Veo 3.1 is the pick when 10 seconds is not enough. Runway is no longer listed here: the page previously named Gen-4, which has since been superseded by Gen-4.5, and we could not reproduce a top-tier placing for either across the boards we track. OpenAI retired the Sora 2 consumer app on April 26, 2026 and only the developer API remains, through September 24, 2026.
What changed this month: the video crown moved from Veo 3.1 to Gemini Omni Flash, since Omni Flash is #1 on both independent video boards while Veo 3.1 is sixth on Arena. The runner-up list was rebuilt on the same boards. Kuaishou’s current line is Kling 3.0 (February 4, 2026, native 4K at 60fps in 15-second clips) and Kling 3.0 Turbo (June 17, 2026), and no Kling model reaches the top 16 on Arena’s text-to-video board, so Kling is listed as the fast-iteration option rather than the runner-up.
The best AI for coding is Claude Fable 5, and it holds that position on more independent boards than any other model. It is #1 on the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 leaderboard at 83.8% running in Claude Code, #1 on LiveBench Coding at 86.0, and #1 on Scale SEAL’s Remote Labor Index at 15.8, roughly 1.9x the next model on real contracted work. It also tops SEAL’s SWE Atlas Refactoring and Test Writing boards and takes #1 on Arena’s coding subcategory.
We have changed the evidence behind this crown. The widely quoted SWE-Bench Pro figure for Fable 5 comes from a vendor scaffold rather than a public board, and the public board disagrees with it: Scale SEAL’s SWE-Bench Pro leaderboards put Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 first on both the public and private splits and do not list Fable 5 in the top six of either. The crown survives on the boards above, so that is what we cite now.
The contender to watch is Kimi K3, which takes #1 on Arena’s WebDev board at 1682, a 52-point margin over Fable 5, and #1 on Arena’s Agent board. Claude Opus 5 is the everyday-value pick at $5 / $25, half the price of Fable 5, and Anthropic’s own docs now tell developers to start with Opus 5 for complex agentic coding and reserve Fable 5 for the highest-capability workloads. Read our cover of Claude Opus 5.
On price-per-result, Artificial Analysis’s Coding Index is not a Claude sweep and we will not pretend otherwise: GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) leads it at 78.3 with Opus 5 (max) at 78.0, a gap small enough to call a tie, with Fable 5 at 76.5 and Kimi K3 at 76.2. The cheapest serious contenders are Grok 4.5 at $2 / $6 and Gemini 3.6 Flash at $1.50 / $7.50. On open weights, GLM-5.2 (MIT) is the strongest available option and is #4 on Arena WebDev.
Model | Best For | Strength | Weakness | Price (per 1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Claude Fable 5 | Best coding overall, long-horizon agentic | #1 Terminal-Bench 2.1 (83.8%), #1 LiveBench Coding (86.0), #1 Remote Labor Index | Priciest; Artificial Analysis Coding Index puts it 7th | $10 / $50 |
Kimi K3 | Web app building and agents | #1 Arena WebDev (1682) and #1 Arena Agent | Not yet on Terminal-Bench; weights not out | $3 / $15 |
Claude Opus 5 | Everyday-value agentic coding | Coding Index 78.0 (statistical tie for #1), Anthropic’s recommended default | Not yet rated on Arena or Terminal-Bench | $5 / $25 |
GPT-5.6 Sol | OpenAI flagship, agentic coding | #1 Artificial Analysis Coding Index at 78.3 (xhigh) | Absent from the official Terminal-Bench board; eval-gaming flagged by METR | $5 / $30 |
Muse Spark 1.1 | Cheap agentic tool use | #1 on SEAL SWE-Bench Pro (public and private) and MCP Atlas (88.1) | US-only preview | $1.25 / $4.25 |
Grok 4.5 | Cheap value coder | #4 on the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 board at 79.3% via Cursor CLI | Higher hallucination rate; EU API console still closed | $2 / $6 |
Gemini 3.6 Flash | Agent coding at scale | Intelligence Index 50, 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash | Weaker on hardest reasoning | $1.50 / $7.50 |
GLM-5.2 | Best open-weight coder | Highest open Intelligence Index (51), #4 Arena WebDev | Self-host or provider only | Open weights (MIT) |
Runner-up and alternatives: Kimi K3 is the runner-up on Arena’s web and agent boards, Claude Opus 5 is the runner-up on value at half the price, GPT-5.6 Sol is the runner-up on Artificial Analysis’s composite, and GLM-5.2 is the open-weight pick. Inside IDEs, Cursor with Claude is still the most popular pairing and Claude Code is the natural pick if you live in the terminal.
What changed this month: the crown stayed with Claude Fable 5 but the evidence behind it was replaced. We dropped the vendor-scaffold SWE-Bench Pro claim, because Scale SEAL’s public SWE-Bench Pro boards contradict it, and rebuilt the case on Terminal-Bench 2.1, LiveBench Coding, the Remote Labor Index and SWE Atlas, where Fable 5 is first. Kimi K3 (July 16) enters as the Arena WebDev and Agent leader, and Claude Opus 5 (July 24) replaces Opus 4.8 as the everyday-value Claude at the same $5 / $25. We have also stopped presenting vendor Terminal-Bench figures as leaderboard results: the official board has Grok 4.5 at 79.3%, not the 83.3% xAI reported, and does not list GPT-5.6 Sol at all.
The best AI for unfiltered, on-trend creative work is Grok 4.5, and we want to be exact about why. This pick is about the product, not the prose quality. Grok 4.5 carries the fewest content restrictions of any frontier model and the only native real-time X integration, which makes it the one model that will engage with edgy, topical or deliberately provocative briefs that the others decline. It is the default in the Grok app for SuperGrok and X Premium+ subscribers at $30/month.
It is not the best writer, and the boards are blunt about it. Grok 4.5 sits #33 on EQ-Bench Creative Writing and #41 on Arena’s creative-writing leaderboard, losing on both to the older Grok 4.20-beta1. If you are picking on output quality alone, Claude Fable 5 wins outright at #1 on Arena creative writing, and Kimi K3 wins EQ-Bench. Choose Grok 4.5 for what it will let you make, not for how well it writes.
Model | Best For | Strength | Weakness | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Grok 4.5 | Unfiltered, opinionated, on-trend | Fewest content restrictions, native real-time X grounding | #33 EQ-Bench, #41 Arena creative writing | $30/mo SuperGrok |
Claude Fable 5 | Highest-quality creative prose | #1 Arena creative writing (1508), #1 LiveBench Language | Cautious guardrails on edgy briefs | $10 / $50 API |
Kimi K3 | Fiction and distinctive voice | #1 EQ-Bench Creative Writing at 2377 | Only #10 on Arena creative writing | $3 / $15 |
Claude Opus 5 | Long-form structured creativity | Holds long threads and self-edits; #1 Intelligence Index | Most cautious of the group | $20/mo Pro, $5 / $25 API |
Gemini 3.1 Pro | Multimodal creative | Strong text, image and video chain | Quotas inside the Gemini app | Free / $2.00-$4.00 API in |
Grok Imagine (Spicy Mode) | NSFW / adult creative | Most permissive image generation | Niche use case | $30/mo SuperGrok |
Runner-up and alternatives: Claude Fable 5 is the runner-up and the right pick if quality matters more than freedom, Kimi K3 is the pick for fiction, and Claude Opus 5 is the pick for creative projects that run across many turns. For adult creative work, Grok Imagine Spicy Mode is still the only frontier-grade option.
What changed this month: Grok 4.5 keeps this pick, but the reasoning is now stated honestly. Adding the human-preference boards showed it at #33 on EQ-Bench and #41 on Arena creative writing, so this section no longer implies that it wins on quality. It is here for its permissiveness and its live X access, and the page now names Claude Fable 5 as the model to use when you want the better writing.
The best AI for accuracy and research is Gemini 3.1 Pro. Its strongest result is on ARC Prize’s ARC-AGI-1, where it scores 98% and ties the human panel, and it does that at $0.52 per task. That combination is the argument: several models are close on capability, none matches it on cost for reliable factual work. It pairs that with native Google Search grounding, which is what you actually want when the answer has to be current rather than merely plausible.
It also scores 94.3% on GPQA Diamond and 44.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam, and tops Scale SEAL’s HLE board at 46.44. We have dropped the page’s previous ARC-AGI-2 framing. Its 77.1% is still correct, but the board has moved and that score now places it around 14th, behind GPT-5.6 Sol at 93% and Claude Opus 5 at 90%, so it is no longer evidence of an accuracy lead.
Two honest caveats. On grounded search specifically, Arena’s search leaderboard is led by Anthropic, not Google, with Gemini 3.1 Pro grounding at #7. And on novel reasoning, GPT-5.6 Sol leads ARC-AGI-2 and Claude Opus 5 leads ARC-AGI-3 at 30%, roughly 3.75x the next-best model according to ARC Prize. We did not move the crown to Opus 5 because Artificial Analysis measures its hallucination rate at 50% and places it below Fable 5 on AA-Omniscience, which is weak ground for a crown named accuracy.
Model | Best For | Key Benchmark | Weakness | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Gemini 3.1 Pro | Cheap, reliable factual work | 98% ARC-AGI-1 (ties human panel) at $0.52/task, 94.3% GPQA | ARC-AGI-2 77.1% now ranks ~14th; #7 on Arena search | $2.00-$4.00 / $12.00-$18.00 (tiered) |
Claude Fable 5 | Grounded search | #1 and #3 on Arena’s search leaderboard, ahead of Google | No single cheap tier | $10 / $50 (Fable 5) |
GPT-5.6 Sol | Novel reasoning | #1 ARC-AGI-2 at 93%, against a 100% human panel | Scheming flagged by METR | $5 / $30 |
Claude Opus 5 | Hardest unseen problems | #1 ARC-AGI-3 at 30%, ~3.75x the next model (ARC Prize) | Artificial Analysis measures a 50% hallucination rate | $5 / $25 |
Qwen 3.7 Max | Frontier accuracy at value pricing | 92.4 GPQA Diamond, 200 free requests/day | API-only, no chat front-end | $1.25 / $3.75 promo; $2.50 / $7.50 list |
Claude Opus 4.6 | Honesty under pressure | #1 on Scale SEAL’s MASK board at 96.28; Anthropic holds the top 5 | Superseded as a flagship | Legacy Anthropic model |
Runner-up and alternatives: Anthropic’s models are the runner-up for grounded search and sweep the honesty-under-pressure board, GPT-5.6 Sol is the runner-up for novel reasoning, and Qwen 3.7 Max is the value pick at the frontier.
What changed this month: Gemini 3.1 Pro keeps the accuracy crown, but on rebased evidence. The lead argument is now 98% on ARC-AGI-1 at $0.52 per task plus Search grounding, and the old ARC-AGI-2 framing is gone because 77.1% now ranks around 14th rather than at the top. We also split out what this category was quietly doing at once, so grounded search now credits Anthropic and novel reasoning credits GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5, rather than implying one model wins all three.
The best AI for hard problem solving is GPT-5.6 Sol, and it is the best-supported crown on this page. It takes #1 on LiveBench Mathematics at 96.2, #1 on LiveBench Reasoning at 91.7, and #1 on ARC-AGI-2 at 93%, the closest any model has come to the 100% human panel. Three separate houses put it first on the reasoning tasks that matter, which is more agreement than any other category on this page produces.
OpenAI has still not published Sol’s FrontierMath score, so the verified OpenAI mark remains GPT-5.5 Pro’s 39.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and we will slot Sol’s number in the moment it goes public. Qwen 3.7 Max is the value alternative for competition-style problems at 97.1 on the February 2026 HMMT index and 44.5 on Apex, at a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT Pro, and it now includes 200 free model requests per day.
Claude Opus 5 is the alternative for long agentic reasoning chains, leading Artificial Analysis’s Agentic Index at 55.3 and ARC Prize’s ARC-AGI-3 at 30%, roughly 3.75x the next-best model. It runs second to Sol on LiveBench Reasoning at 91.2. For multimodal reasoning where the problem includes diagrams or documents, Gemini 3.1 Pro is still the practical pick.
Model | Best For | Key Benchmark | Weakness | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
GPT-5.6 Sol | Hardest math, science and reasoning | #1 LiveBench Mathematics (96.2), #1 LiveBench Reasoning (91.7), #1 ARC-AGI-2 (93%) | FrontierMath still unpublished; scheming flagged by METR | $100/mo ChatGPT Pro; API $5 / $30 |
Claude Opus 5 | Long agentic reasoning chains | #1 Agentic Index (55.3), #1 ARC-AGI-3 (30%) | Second on LiveBench Reasoning; 50% hallucination rate | $5 / $25 |
GPT-5.5 Pro | Verified FrontierMath leader | 39.6% FrontierMath Tier 4 | Superseded by Sol as flagship | $100/mo ChatGPT Pro |
Qwen 3.7 Max | Competition math on a budget | 97.1 HMMT 2026 Feb, 44.5 Apex, 200 free requests/day | API-only | $1.25 / $3.75 promo; $2.50 / $7.50 list |
Claude Fable 5 | Math inside a coding workflow | #1 on Arena’s math subcategory (1543), 96.0 LiveBench Mathematics | Priciest option here | $10 / $50 |
GLM-5.2 | Open-weight problem solving | Highest open Intelligence Index at 51, MIT, 1M context | Self-host or provider only | Open weights (MIT) |
Runner-up and alternatives: Claude Opus 5 is the runner-up and the natural pick for long-chain agentic reasoning, Claude Fable 5 is the runner-up on Arena’s math board, Qwen 3.7 Max is the value pick, and GLM-5.2 is the open-weight pick.
What changed this month: GPT-5.6 Sol keeps this crown and the case for it got stronger, not weaker. Widening the research to LiveBench and ARC Prize showed it first on mathematics, reasoning and ARC-AGI-2, so this is now the most defensible pick on the page. Claude Opus 5 (July 24) enters as the agentic-reasoning alternative on the strength of ARC-AGI-3, and Qwen 3.7 Max picked up a free tier of 200 requests per day.
The best AI agent right now is Gemini Spark for 24/7 cloud-resident work and Claude Cowork for desktop-resident work, with ChatGPT Codex as the alternative for coding agents and OpenAI Operator-class browser agents as the alternative for web tasks. AI agents are the fastest-moving category of 2026: each top vendor now ships an agent product, and the practical choice is between agents that live in the cloud (run while your laptop is closed) and agents that live on your desktop (drive your apps directly).
Gemini Spark launched at Google I/O on May 19, 2026 and is the first 24/7 cloud agent. Claude Cowork launched in general availability on April 9, 2026 and runs as a desktop agent that drives your local apps. ChatGPT Codex Mobile (May 14) is the pick for coding-agent work, now usable from iOS and Android. Read the full Gemini Spark vs Claude Cowork comparison.
Agent | Best For | Where It Runs | Strength | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Gemini Spark | 24/7 cloud tasks, Workspace workflows | Google Cloud VM (always-on) | First true 24/7 agent, deep Workspace integration | $99.99/mo Google AI Ultra |
Claude Cowork | Desktop, app-driving, design + code | Your Mac/Windows desktop | Drives local apps, sees your screen | $20/mo Claude Pro |
ChatGPT Codex Mobile | Coding agent on phone | OpenAI cloud + iOS/Android | Approve diffs and redirect work from phone | Included in ChatGPT plans |
Grok Agentic (Grok 4.5) | Real-time research, X scraping | xAI cloud | Native X integration | $30/mo SuperGrok |
OpenAI Operator-class | Browser tasks, web forms | OpenAI cloud + your browser | Web automation | ChatGPT Pro |
Runner-up and alternatives: Claude Cowork is the runner-up overall and the natural pick when you want the agent on your machine driving your apps. ChatGPT Codex Mobile is the runner-up for coding agents. Grok Agentic is the niche pick for real-time research.
What changed this month: no new consumer agents shipped, so the Gemini Spark (cloud) versus Claude Cowork (desktop) choice still drives most agent decisions for individual users. The model layer underneath them moved a lot. Claude Opus 5 (July 24) took #1 on Artificial Analysis’s Agentic Index at 55.3, ahead of GPT-5.6 Sol at 54.0 and Claude Fable 5 at 52.8, and it costs $5 / $25. Kimi K3 took #1 on Arena’s Agent board, where the metric is task success rate rather than Elo, ahead of Fable 5 and Opus 4.8. For teams building their own agents, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 is a cheap agent-native option at $1.25 / $4.25 that leads Scale SEAL’s MCP Atlas tool-use board at 88.1, and GLM-5.2 (MIT) is the strongest open-weight agent model at #4 on Arena’s Agent board.
Here is the July 2026 pricing comparison for every leading AI model, in API cost per 1 million tokens and the consumer-subscription price for the same model. Free tiers exist for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek. The most consequential price on this table is Claude Opus 5 at $5 / $25, because it is the #1 model on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index at half the cost of Claude Fable 5. Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 lists at $1.25 / $4.25 and Grok 4.5 at $2 / $6, and on a price-per-intelligence basis Artificial Analysis puts a Grok 4.5 index task at about $0.31, five times cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5. Among closed models Gemini 3.6 Flash at $1.50 / $7.50 stays the cheapest frontier all-rounder; the cheapest open-weight frontier coder is MiniMax M3 at around $0.60 per million input tokens, and the cheapest open-weight model with a 1M context is DeepSeek V4-Flash at $0.14 / $0.28. For a deeper breakdown by tier, see our full AI Pricing Comparison Guide hub.
Model | Input (per 1M) | Output (per 1M) | Context Window | Free access? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | $30.00 | 1M (400K in Codex) | ChatGPT Free; API paid |
GPT-5.5 Pro | $30.00 | $180.00 | 1M | ChatGPT Pro from $100/mo ($200 higher-usage tier) |
GPT-5.6 Sol | $5.00 | $30.00 | not published | Live in ChatGPT, Codex & API (July 9) |
GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.50 | $15.00 | not published | Live in ChatGPT, Codex & API (July 9) |
GPT-5.6 Luna | $1.00 | $6.00 | not published | Live in ChatGPT, Codex & API (July 9) |
Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M | Claude Pro/Max default; API paid |
Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M | Legacy model at Anthropic; Pro/Max/API |
Claude Fable 5 | $10.00 | $50.00 | 1M | Permanent in Max/Team Premium (~50% of usage limits); Pro/Team Standard via credits |
Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 intro / $3.00 list | $10.00 intro / $15.00 list | 1M | Claude Free & Pro default; API paid |
Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1M | API paid (superseded by Sonnet 5) |
Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 (≤200K) / $4.00 (>200K) | $12.00 (≤200K) / $18.00 (>200K) | 1M | Limited Gemini app; API paid |
Gemini 3.6 Flash | $1.50 | $7.50 | 1M | Gemini app/AI Studio; free API tier + paid API |
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite | $0.30 | $2.50 | 1M | AI Studio; free API tier + paid API |
Qwen 3.7 Max | $1.25 promo / $2.50 list | $3.75 promo / $7.50 list | 1M | 200 free requests/day; API paid beyond that |
MiniMax M3 | ~$0.60 | ~$2.40 (≤512K) | 1M | Open weights; hosting costs apply |
LongCat-2.0 | Provider-dependent | Provider-dependent | 1M | Open weights (MIT); hosting costs apply |
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra | Provider-dependent | Provider-dependent | 1M | Open weights (OpenMDW); hosting costs apply |
Qwen 3.5 (open-weight) | Self-host / Together | Self-host / Together | 1M | Open weights; hosting costs apply |
Nex-N2-Pro | Self-host / providers | Self-host / providers | 1M | Open weights (Apache 2.0); hosting costs apply |
Rio 3.5 Open 397B | Self-host / providers | Self-host / providers | 1M | Open weights (MIT); hosting costs apply |
Grok 4.3 | $1.25 | $2.50 | 1M | Free consumer plan; API paid |
Grok 4.5 | $2.00 | $6.00 | 500K | Grok Build / Cursor / xAI console; EU partial, API console still closed |
Muse Spark 1.1 | $1.25 | $4.25 | 1M | Meta Model API ($20 free credits, US preview); free in Meta AI Thinking mode |
Kimi K3 | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1M | Free basic tier in the Kimi app; open weights due July 27 |
Gemini Omni Flash (video) | $1.50 | $17.50 (video output) | 10-second clips | Gemini app / Flow; AI Studio + API |
DeepSeek V4-Pro | $0.435 ($0.0036 cache-hit) | $0.87 | 1M | DeepSeek Chat free; API paid |
DeepSeek V4-Flash | $0.14 | $0.28 | 1M | DeepSeek Chat free; API paid |
Kimi K2.7 Code | Provider-dependent | Provider-dependent | 256K | Open weights; hosting costs apply |
GLM-5.2 | Provider-dependent | Provider-dependent | 1M | Open weights; hosting costs apply |
ERNIE 5.1 | China-region pricing | China-region pricing | 256K | Baidu free tier |
Gemini Spark (agent) | Not API-priced | Not API-priced | 1M (Gemini base) | Google AI Ultra $99.99 or $199.99/mo |
Fello AI (aggregator) | Routed via app | Routed via app | Model-dependent | $9.99/mo |
The GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro rates above are short-context prices. OpenAI labels those rows “(<272K context length)” and bills longer prompts at a higher tier, but it no longer publishes the specific long-context figures, so we have stopped quoting them. The GPT-5.6 tiers carry no such split.
If you want access to multiple AI models without managing separate subscriptions, Fello AI provides GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and more in a single app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, starting at $9.99/month with a free tier available. Models are updated regularly so you always have access to the latest.
Claude hit #1 on the App Store free chart on February 28, 2026, pushing ChatGPT out of the top spot for the first time. The catalyst was Anthropic refusing the Pentagon’s demand to strip the guardrails off Claude for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The administration then told federal agencies
Update, July 10, 2026: Both chatbots just moved to new flagship models. ChatGPT now runs GPT-5.6 (the Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers), which began its broad public rollout on July 9, 2026, and Grok is powered by Grok 4.5, xAI’s coding-focused release from July 8, 2026. The pricing, benchmarks, and
Update, July 10, 2026: ChatGPT moved to a new flagship. GPT-5.6 began its broad public rollout on July 9, 2026 as a three-tier family, Sol (flagship), Terra (balanced), and Luna (fast and cheapest). On the Google side, Gemini 3.1 Pro remains the paid flagship on Google AI Pro and Gemini
Choosing the right AI tool in 2026 feels like trying to hit a moving target. New models arrive every few weeks, and what worked best in January might already be outdated today. This guide cuts through the hype to show you exactly which tools are winning right now based on
TL;DR: In January 2026, there isn’t one “best” AI for everything. On LMArena’s Text leaderboard, Gemini 3 Pro leads user-preference rankings, while the updated Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.0 reports GPT-5.2 (with extended reasoning) as the top overall benchmark performer. Choose based on your task: Gemini for daily assistance, Claude
Update, July 2026: both models here have since been succeeded. Google has shipped Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana 2 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT Image line now powers ChatGPT Images 2.0. The head-to-head below is our original December 2025 test of GPT-Image-1.5 vs Nano Banana Pro, with the hands-on images
The best AI for students is GPT-5.5 Free inside ChatGPT for general coursework and Gemini 3.6 Flash Free inside the Gemini app for STEM and multimodal study, with Qwen 3.7 Max as the API alternative for harder problem sets (200 free requests a day) and Claude Opus 5 as the alternative for essay editing.
Most students don’t need to pay: the free ChatGPT tier now defaults to GPT-5.6 (with GPT-5.5 still available), Gemini 3.6 Flash is in the free Gemini app and AI Studio, Claude Sonnet 5 is the new free Claude default, and DeepSeek V4 is free on DeepSeek’s chat site. For step-by-step working on the hardest math, GPT-5.6 Sol is OpenAI’s new flagship (its FrontierMath score is not yet published, with GPT-5.5 Pro’s verified 39.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4 the current mark), though both are paid-only; Qwen 3.7 Max is the value alternative at 97.1 HMMT 2026 February with API pricing at $1.25 / $3.75 on its current 50% promo ($2.50 / $7.50 list).
Task | Best Model | Why | Free? | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Essays & coursework | GPT-5.5 | Free in ChatGPT, improved factual reliability vs 5.4 | Yes | Claude Sonnet 5 (free Claude) |
STEM problem-solving | GPT-5.6 Sol / Qwen 3.7 Max | New STEM flagship (5.5 Pro: 39.6% FrontierMath) / 97.1 HMMT 2026 Feb | Pro paid / Qwen API paid | Gemini 3.6 Flash (free) |
Research & accuracy | Gemini 3.1 Pro | 98% ARC-AGI-1 at $0.52/task, native Google Search grounding | Yes (Gemini app) | Claude Opus 5 |
Writing editing | Claude Sonnet 5 | Free and default on claude.ai; Claude Fable 5 is the quality leader | Yes (Claude free) | Claude Fable 5 |
Multimodal study (PDFs, slides, images) | Gemini 3.6 Flash | 1M context, free in Gemini app | Yes | NotebookLM (Google) |
Runner-up and alternatives: Claude Sonnet 5 (free) is the runner-up for essay writing and editing. Gemini 3.6 Flash (free) is the runner-up for multimodal study and PDF ingestion. DeepSeek V4 is the runner-up for problem-solving on a strict zero-cost budget.
The best AI for professional work is GPT-5.6 (ChatGPT’s default since July 9) for daily knowledge work, Claude Opus 5 for coding and high-stakes writing, and Gemini Spark for 24/7 agentic workflows. Most professionals get the most out of running two paid subscriptions (ChatGPT Plus at $20/month plus Claude Pro at $20/month, total $40/month), or consolidating with Fello AI at $9.99/month for all five top models in one Mac/iOS app. For agentic work that runs while you sleep, Gemini Spark on Google AI Ultra at $99.99/month is the only true 24/7 cloud agent.
Use Case | Best Model | Key Stat | Price | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Daily knowledge work | GPT-5.6 | ChatGPT’s default since July 9; the assistant most people can open | $20/mo ChatGPT Plus | Claude Opus 5 |
Coding (proprietary) | Claude Opus 5 | Coding Index 78.0, a statistical tie for #1; Anthropic’s recommended default | $20/mo Claude Pro | Claude Fable 5 |
Coding (cost-effective) | Qwen 3.7 Max | 80.4 SWE-Verified, 1M context | $1.25 / $3.75 promo; $2.50 / $7.50 list | MiniMax M3 |
Research & briefings | Gemini 3.1 Pro | 98% ARC-AGI-1 at $0.52/task, Google grounding | Google AI Pro / Ultra | Claude Opus 5 |
Hard math, physics, finance modelling | GPT-5.6 Sol | OpenAI’s new STEM flagship (5.5 Pro verified at 39.6% FrontierMath) | $100/mo ChatGPT Pro | Qwen 3.7 Max |
Always-on agent workflows | Gemini Spark | First 24/7 cloud agent | $99.99/mo Google AI Ultra | Claude Cowork |
Live news, X-context creative | Grok 4.5 | Opus-class + native X grounding | $30/mo SuperGrok | Gemini 3.1 Pro |
All-in-one consolidation | Fello AI | ChatGPT + Claude + Gemini + Grok + DeepSeek | $9.99/mo | Pay each vendor separately |
Runner-up and alternatives: for most professional teams, Claude Opus 5 is the runner-up to GPT-5.6 for daily work and the value leader for coding at $5 / $25, with Claude Fable 5 above it on the coding boards. Gemini 3.1 Pro is the runner-up for research-heavy roles, and Gemini Spark is the unique pick if you can put a cloud agent to work on long tasks.
The best open-weight model in July 2026 is GLM-5.2 (Z.ai, MIT), and two independent houses agree on it. It holds the highest Intelligence Index of any open model at 51 on Artificial Analysis v4.1, and on Arena it is the top open entry wherever an open model reaches the top 20, at #4 on WebDev (1587.7) and #4 on the Agent board. It runs a 1M-token context and is built for long-horizon autonomous coding.
Behind it the field is crowded and close. DeepSeek V4-Pro and MiniMax M3 tie at 44, Kimi K2.7 Code and Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5-Pro at 42, and three models sit level at 41: Nex-N2-Pro, plus two new arrivals, Hy3 (Tencent, Apache 2.0, July 6) and Inkling (Thinking Machines, July 15). NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 Ultra scores 38 and Meituan’s LongCat-2.0 scores 33. Those are v4.1 figures and they are not comparable with the higher numbers Artificial Analysis published earlier in 2026.
The change to watch is Kimi K3. At Intelligence Index 57 it would instantly lead the open field by six points, and Moonshot has said the weights land on July 27, 2026 under a Modified MIT license. As of this update they have not shipped, so Kimi K3 is still a proprietary API model and is not on the board below. Read our review of Kimi K3.
One honest limit on how far open weights have come. On Arena’s boards, open models reach the top 20 only on Agent, WebDev, Math, longer-query, instruction-following, document and the two image boards. On text overall, creative writing, coding, hard prompts, multi-turn, vision, search and text-to-video, no open model is in the top 20 at all. Open weights are excellent value and genuinely competitive at agentic coding; they are not yet at parity across the board.
Licensing matters as much as raw score here. Kimi K2.7 (Modified MIT), DeepSeek V4 (MIT), GLM-5.2 (MIT), LongCat-2.0 (MIT), Hy3 (Apache 2.0), Nex-N2-Pro (Apache 2.0) and Nemotron 3 Ultra (OpenMDW) all clearly allow commercial use, while MiniMax M3 ships under its own community license. Nex-N2-Pro posts the strongest first-party open coding scores at 80.8 on SWE-Bench Verified and 75.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.1.
Model | Best For | Key Benchmark | Context / License | Where To Run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
LongCat-2.0 | Frontier open coder trained on Chinese chips | II 33 (v4.1); 59.5% SWE-Bench Pro (vendor), 1.6T/~48B active | 1M / MIT | Hugging Face, GitHub, OpenRouter |
MiniMax M3 | Cheap frontier-class multimodal | II 44 (v4.1), 59% SWE-Bench Pro, multimodal | 1M / license TBD | Hugging Face, API ~$0.60/1M |
Nex-N2-Pro | Strongest open coding score | II 41 (v4.1); 80.8 SWE-Bench Verified, 397B/17B active | Qwen-based / Apache 2.0 | Hugging Face, providers, self-host |
Kimi K2.7 Code | Strongest commercially-licensed open coder | +21.8% on Kimi Code Bench v2 vs K2.6 (vendor); 1T/32B active | 256K / Modified MIT | Hugging Face, DeepInfra, providers |
DeepSeek V4-Pro | Agentic real-world work | II 44 (v4.1), 1.6T/49B active | 1M / MIT | DeepSeek API ($0.435/$0.87), local |
GLM-5.2 | Long-horizon agentic coding, 1M context | II 51 (v4.1), highest of any open model; 744B/40B active | 1M / MIT | Z.ai, Hugging Face, OpenRouter |
Hy3 | Newest permissive-licence entrant | II 41 (v4.1); #19 on Arena WebDev (1516.7) | Apache 2.0 | Hugging Face, providers, self-host |
Inkling | Thinking Machines’ first open model | II 41 (v4.1), agentic 32.3, released July 15 | Open weights | Hugging Face, providers, self-host |
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra | NVIDIA-tuned, fully permissive license | II 38 (v4.1), 65-70.4 SWE-Bench Verified, 550B/55B active | 1M / OpenMDW | OpenRouter, Hugging Face, AWS (8× B200 self-host) |
DeepSeek V4-Flash | Cheapest 1M-context open model | II 40 (v4.1), $0.14/$0.28 per 1M, 284B/13B active | 1M / MIT | DeepSeek API, local |
Qwen 3.5 (397B / 17B active) | Multimodal, fast decode | 88.4 GPQA, 91.3 AIME 2026, 83.6 LiveCodeBench v6 | 1M / open | Together, OpenRouter, local |
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | Efficient open agentic coder (3B active) | 86.0 GPQA Diamond, 92.7 AIME 2026, 35B/3B active | 262K (→1M YaRN) / Apache 2.0 | Hugging Face, OpenRouter, local |
Qwen3.6-27B | Laptop-runnable dense coder | 87.8 GPQA Diamond, dense 27B, multimodal | 256K / Apache 2.0 | Local Mac/PC, Hugging Face, OpenRouter |
Rio 3.5 Open 397B | Qwen 3.5 fine-tune, multilingual reasoning | 70.8 Terminal-Bench 2.1 (first-party), beats Qwen 3.7 Plus on 4/5 | 397B / 17B active, MIT | Hugging Face, providers, self-host |
Qwen 3.5-9B | Laptop-runnable open-weight | 81.7 GPQA Diamond | Dense / open | Local Mac/PC with 16GB+ RAM |
Llama 4 Maverick | Meta-line flagship | 17B active / 400B total params | Llama 4 license | Meta cloud, Hugging Face, local |
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni | Edge / low-power | Multimodal, very small footprint | Compact / open | Local, NVIDIA tool |
Runner-up and alternatives: DeepSeek V4-Pro and MiniMax M3 are the runners-up at 44, Hy3 and Inkling are the newest arrivals at 41, DeepSeek V4-Flash is the cheapest way to get a 1M-context open model, and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is the natural pick for edge and on-device use. Watch July 27, when Kimi K3’s weights are due and would take this crown outright at Intelligence Index 57.
Every ranking on this page combines three inputs: public benchmarks from seven independent houses (Artificial Analysis, Arena formerly LMArena, Scale SEAL, LiveBench, EQ-Bench, ARC Prize and the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 board, covering the Intelligence and Agentic indexes, GPQA Diamond, ARC-AGI-1 through 3, Humanity’s Last Exam, GDPval-AA, FrontierMath, HMMT, MCP Atlas, SWE Atlas and the Remote Labor Index), published API and subscription pricing from each vendor’s official pricing page, and hands-on use by the FelloAI editorial team running real prompts across the same task on every model. We re-fetch official pricing and benchmark sources before every monthly update.
Benchmarks are weighted to the use case: SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench drive coding, GPQA Diamond and ARC-AGI-2 drive accuracy, GDPval-AA (Artificial Analysis’s professional-deliverables benchmark) informs professional-task quality while writing style is judged primarily by hands-on testing, FrontierMath and HMMT drive problem-solving. We disclose when a benchmark is vendor-reported but not independently verified, and we strip any claim we cannot reproduce against a live source. We do not move a category crown on the strength of a single leaderboard, and where a new model is too recent for the human-preference boards to have rated it, we say so rather than crowning it on benchmark scores alone. When a model goes through a major upgrade between updates, we re-rank the category and add a “What changed this month” line at the bottom of the deep-dive.
It depends on the task. On overall benchmark score, Claude Opus 5 (July 24) is #1 on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index at 61 and its Agentic Index at 55.3, though the human-preference boards at Arena and Scale SEAL have not rated it yet. For daily chat, GPT-5.6 has been ChatGPT’s default since July 9 and is the assistant most people can actually open, although Claude Fable 5 leads Arena’s text leaderboard. For coding and writing, Claude Fable 5 is #1 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (83.8%), LiveBench Coding (86.0), Arena creative writing (1508) and LiveBench Language (90.7). For accuracy, Gemini 3.1 Pro ties the human panel on ARC-AGI-1 at 98% for $0.52 a task. For hard math and reasoning, GPT-5.6 Sol is #1 on LiveBench Mathematics, LiveBench Reasoning and ARC-AGI-2. For images, ChatGPT Images 2.0 leads both boards, and for video Gemini Omni Flash leads both. For agents, Gemini Spark is the 24/7 cloud agent and Claude Cowork the desktop one.
The biggest launch of the month is Claude Opus 5 (July 24), which took #1 on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index at 61 and Agentic Index at 55.3 at $5 / $25 per 1M tokens. Moonshot launched Kimi K3 on July 16 at Intelligence Index 57, with open weights due July 27, and Google shipped Gemini 3.6 Flash on July 21, cutting output to $7.50 per 1M tokens. The month opened with Claude Fable 5 back online (July 1) after the US government lifted the June 12 export-control order that had pulled it offline. On July 8 and 9, four more launches landed: OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna) reached general availability on July 9 and became ChatGPT’s new default; xAI took Grok 4.5 public on July 8 as a cheap Cursor-trained coding model at $2 / $6 per 1M tokens that Artificial Analysis scores at Intelligence Index 54 on v4.1; Meta shipped Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9 as its first paid model, a $1.25 / $4.25 agentic coder; and ByteDance released Seedream 5.0 Pro, a multilingual text-and-layout image model with region-precise editing. The rest of the headlines landed in the final week of June: OpenAI first previewed GPT-5.6 on June 26 behind a US-government access list; Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter MIT coding model trained entirely on Chinese chips, on June 29; and Anthropic made Claude Sonnet 5 its new default model on June 30. Gemini 3.5 Pro is still unreleased; Bloomberg reported on July 16 that it is months behind schedule and short of Google’s internal goals, particularly in coding. These follow the late-May and June board of Claude Opus 4.8 (Intelligence Index 56 on v4.1), Qwen 3.7 Max, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark, and the open-weight wave of MiniMax M3, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, Kimi K2.7, and GLM-5.2.
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s newest flagship, released July 24, 2026, and the current #1 model on Artificial Analysis. It leads both the Intelligence Index at 61 and the Agentic Index at 55.3, and tops the GDPval-AA v2 professional-deliverables board at 1861, well clear of Claude Fable 5’s 1747. API pricing is $5 / $25 per 1M tokens, the same as Opus 4.8 and half the cost of Fable 5, with a 1M-token context window and a May 2026 knowledge cutoff. ARC Prize independently confirms Anthropic’s launch claim on ARC-AGI-3, where Opus 5 scores 30% against 8% for the next-best model, roughly 3.75x. Two things to keep in mind: Arena, Scale SEAL, EQ-Bench and Terminal-Bench have not rated it yet, so every Opus 5 figure is benchmark-run rather than vote-based, and Artificial Analysis measures its hallucination rate at 50%. That is why it holds no crown on this page yet. Read our cover of Claude Opus 5.
Yes. Anthropic redeployed Claude Fable 5 on July 1, 2026 after the US government lifted the export-control restriction it had imposed on June 12. It is available again on the Claude API, Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Anthropic made Fable 5 permanent in the paid plans on July 20, 2026. Max and Team Premium include it at roughly 50% of regular usage limits; Pro and Team Standard reach it through usage credits with a one-time $100 starting credit. API pricing is $10 / $50 per million tokens. Fable 5 is a Mythos-class model built for long-horizon agentic work with a 1M-token context, and it holds the coding crown at #1 on the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 board (83.8%) and #1 on LiveBench Coding (86.0).
Claude Sonnet 5 is Anthropic’s new default model, launched June 30, 2026 for Free and Pro users on claude.ai and live in the Claude API, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, and GitHub Copilot. It ships with a 1-million-token context window at introductory pricing of $2 / $10 per 1M tokens through August 31, 2026 (then $3 / $15). It scores 1,603 on GDPval-AA v2, ahead of Opus 4.8’s 1,593, and closes much of the agentic gap to Opus 4.8 while costing far less than GPT-5.5. Note that those Elo boards are re-fitted as models are added, so these numbers are lower than the ones we published earlier and Claude Opus 5 now tops the board at 1,861. Sonnet 5 no longer holds our writing crown, which moved to Claude Fable 5 once we added the human-preference boards, but it is still the writing model most people should use because it is free and default on claude.ai. The one caveat is an updated tokenizer that maps the same text to roughly 1.0-1.35x more tokens.
Yes, as of July 9, 2026. GPT-5.6 is OpenAI’s next-generation model family, and after a two-week gated preview that began June 26 behind a US-government safety review, it reached general availability on July 9. There are three tiers, least to most capable: Luna, the fast, cheapest tier ($1 / $6 per 1M tokens); Terra, a balanced everyday model OpenAI says matches GPT-5.5 at roughly half the cost ($2.50 / $15); and Sol, the flagship tuned for biology, chemistry, and cybersecurity ($5 / $30). It is now live across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API as OpenAI’s default model. On the limited benchmarks OpenAI published, Sol scores 88.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (91.9% in ultra mode) versus GPT-5.5’s 88.0%; OpenAI withheld the usual SWE-bench, GPQA, and FrontierMath numbers, and the context window is still not officially published. One caveat: OpenAI’s system card and the external evaluator METR flagged elevated “scheming” behaviour in Sol, so treat it carefully for high-stakes factual work until independent results settle.
Yes. xAI released Grok 4.5 publicly on July 8, 2026, its first flagship since SpaceX absorbed the company and went public as SPCX. Elon Musk describes it as “an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost,” and says internally it is “roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster.” It is Cursor-trained and aimed at coding and agentic work, priced at $2 / $6 per 1M tokens with a 500K-token context window, well under Opus 4.8’s $5 / $25. It is live in Grok Build, Cursor on all plans, and the xAI console. EU access began rolling out after a July 16 announcement and is still partial, with Cursor reporting availability while xAI’s API console remains closed to EU users under the AI Act’s systemic-risk obligations. Independent scores are now in: Artificial Analysis scores it at Intelligence Index 54 on v4.1, matching the field on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (83.3%) but trailing on SWE-Bench Pro at 64.7% (below Opus 4.8’s 69.2%), so it is the value pick rather than the outright benchmark leader. Grok 4.5 is also our creativity pick, but on product grounds rather than quality: it has the fewest content restrictions and native real-time X access, while sitting #33 on EQ-Bench Creative Writing and #41 on Arena’s creative-writing board. For the best-written output, Claude Fable 5 wins that comparison outright.
GLM-5.2 (June 13, MIT) is the best open-weight model right now, and two houses agree on it. It has the highest Intelligence Index of any open model at 51 on Artificial Analysis v4.1, and on Arena it is the top open entry at #4 on WebDev and #4 on the Agent board. Behind it, DeepSeek V4-Pro and MiniMax M3 tie at 44, Kimi K2.7 Code and MiMo-V2.5-Pro at 42, and three sit at 41: Nex-N2-Pro plus two July arrivals, Hy3 (Tencent, Apache 2.0) and Inkling (Thinking Machines). Nemotron 3 Ultra scores 38 and LongCat-2.0 scores 33. The one to watch is Kimi K3: at Intelligence Index 57 it would lead the open field by six points, and its weights are due July 27, 2026 under a Modified MIT licence, though they have not landed yet. Worth knowing honestly: on Arena, no open model reaches the top 20 on text overall, creative writing, coding, hard prompts, multi-turn, vision, search or text-to-video.
Qwen 3.7 Max is Alibaba’s flagship API model, launched May 20, 2026 at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Hangzhou. It scores Intelligence Index 46 on Artificial Analysis’s current v4.1 scale (it scored 57 at launch on the older scale), 92.4 on GPQA Diamond, 97.1 on HMMT 2026 February, and 80.4 on SWE-Verified. List API pricing is $2.50 / $7.50 per 1M tokens with a 1M-token context window, plus $0.25 cached input (a 90% cache discount); a 50% launch promotion is still active, cutting it to $1.25 / $3.75 (cached input $0.125), and Alibaba now includes 200 free model requests per day. Compared to GPT-5.5 at $5 / $30, Qwen 3.7 Max is half the input cost and a quarter of the output cost, but GPT-5.5 still leads on Intelligence Index (55 versus 46 on v4.1) and on FrontierMath. For cost-sensitive agentic and long-context work where you want frontier-adjacent quality, Qwen 3.7 Max is the value pick.
The GPT-5.5 family launched April 23, 2026. The headline change is factual reliability: on a selected set of user-flagged conversations, OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5’s individual claims were 23% more likely to be factually correct than GPT-5.4’s, with full responses containing a factual error about 3% less often, plus faster response times across all tiers and a refreshed memory system. The consumer default is GPT-5.5 Instant (free with limits), and the gpt-5.5 API model runs $5 / $30 per 1M tokens. GPT-5.5 Pro is the higher-reasoning variant, available inside ChatGPT Pro at $100/month, and leads FrontierMath Tier 4 at 39.6%. Its successor GPT-5.6 reached general availability on July 9, 2026. OpenAI still sells GPT-5.5 at $5 / $30, but Artificial Analysis has since marked every GPT-5.5 reasoning tier deprecated, so treat it as a model you can still buy rather than a current benchmark reference.
Not on every benchmark, but it is still the best default. GPT-5.6 became ChatGPT’s default on July 9 and is the assistant most people can open, though Claude Fable 5 leads Arena’s text leaderboard on measured preference. GPT-5.5 Instant is still the safer pick for hallucination-sensitive work. Claude Opus 5 is the better pick for coding and long agentic tasks and leads Intelligence Index v4.1 at 61, ahead of Claude Fable 5 at 60. Gemini 3.1 Pro is the better pick for accuracy and research. Gemini 3.6 Flash is the better pick for price-performance. Qwen 3.7 Max is the better pick for cost-effective frontier work. ChatGPT remains the most polished consumer product overall and the natural starting point if you only pay for one model.
Gemini Spark is Google’s first 24/7 cloud-resident AI agent, launched at Google I/O on May 19, 2026 and exclusive to the Google AI Ultra plan, which Google restructured at I/O to include a $99.99/month entry tier and a $199.99/month top tier. Spark is built on Gemini base models with Google’s Antigravity harness on a Google Cloud VM, integrates with Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google Workspace apps, and can interact with Chrome and Android’s Halo system on the device side. It is worth the spend for users who have repeatable long-running workflows (inbox triage, research roll-ups, scheduled tasks). For one-off tasks, Claude Cowork at $20/month covers most desktop-agent needs.
On API pricing per million tokens, Gemini 3.6 Flash at $1.50 / $7.50 is the cheapest closed frontier-class model (it beats Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agent benchmarks at ~40% lower cost). MiniMax M3 at around $0.60 per million input tokens is the cheapest open-weight frontier coder, with LongCat-2.0 as a strong MIT alternative. Qwen 3.7 Max at $1.25 / $3.75 on its current promo ($2.50 / $7.50 list) is the cheapest at the top Intelligence Index tier, and for an open-weight model with a 1M context, DeepSeek V4-Flash at $0.14 / $0.28 is the cheapest by an order of magnitude. Note that OpenAI bills GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro at a higher tier for prompts over 272K input tokens, though it no longer publishes those long-context figures. The GPT-5.6 tiers carry no such split.
ChatGPT Free now defaults to GPT-5.6 (with GPT-5.5 still available) under usage limits. Gemini Free runs Gemini 3.6 Flash in the Gemini app and Google AI Studio. Claude Free runs Claude Sonnet 5 (the new default) with daily limits. DeepSeek Chat runs DeepSeek V4 free on the DeepSeek website. Grok has a limited free consumer plan (X Premium is a paid add-on). Qwen 3.5, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, MiniMax M3, LongCat-2.0, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4, and GLM-5.2 are open-weight and free to self-host. Qwen 3.7 Max is API-only with no consumer chat front-end, but Alibaba now includes 200 free model requests per day. Kimi has a free basic tier in its app, with heavier agentic use metered.
Claude Fable 5 is the best for coding, and it holds that on more independent boards than any rival: #1 on the official Terminal-Bench 2.1 leaderboard (83.8%), #1 on LiveBench Coding (86.0), #1 on Scale SEAL’s Remote Labor Index (15.8, about 1.9x the next model), and #1 on SEAL’s SWE Atlas Refactoring and Test Writing boards. It runs $10 / $50 per 1M tokens. Claude Opus 5 is the everyday-value pick at $5 / $25, and Anthropic’s own docs now say to start with Opus 5 for complex agentic coding. Kimi K3 is the contender, taking #1 on Arena’s WebDev board at 1682 and #1 on its Agent board. Note that Artificial Analysis’s Coding Index is not a Claude sweep: GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) leads it at 78.3 with Opus 5 at 78.0, close enough to call a tie. Gemini 3.6 Flash is the price-performance pick at $1.50 / $7.50, and GLM-5.2 (MIT) is the best open-weight coder.
Claude Fable 5 is the best for writing, and it is the only model in the top three of all three independent writing boards: #1 on Arena creative writing (1508), #1 on LiveBench Language (90.7) and #3 on EQ-Bench Creative Writing v3. It costs $10 / $50 per 1M tokens. Claude Sonnet 5 is the value pick and what most people should actually use, since it is free and default on claude.ai at $2 / $10 introductory pricing, though it ranks #53 on Arena creative writing. Kimi K3 wins EQ-Bench outright at 2377 if you want distinctive fiction, Claude Opus 5 tops the GDPval-AA v2 professional-deliverables board at 1861, GPT-5.5 is the alternative for fact-anchored business writing, and Gemini 3.6 Flash is the price-performance pick for bulk content.
Gemini 3.1 Pro is the best for accuracy and research. It ties the human panel on ARC-AGI-1 at 98% and does it at $0.52 per task, scores 94.3% on GPQA Diamond, and has native Google Search grounding for live factual answers. Its 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 is still correct but now ranks around 14th, so we no longer lead with it. Two caveats worth knowing: on grounded search specifically, Arena’s leaderboard is led by Anthropic rather than Google, with Gemini 3.1 Pro grounding at #7; and on novel reasoning, GPT-5.6 Sol leads ARC-AGI-2 at 93% while Claude Opus 5 leads ARC-AGI-3 at 30%. We did not move this crown to Opus 5 because Artificial Analysis measures its hallucination rate at 50%. Gemini 3.5 Pro is still unreleased.
ChatGPT Images 2.0 is the best for images, and it leads both boards: #1 on Arena text-to-image at 1385 and #1 on image editing at 1465. It is still the strongest at readable multilingual text and infographic-style output. Reve 2.1 (July 9) is the real #2 on text-to-image at 1302, with Reve 2.0 now behind it on both boards. Meta’s Muse Image is #3 on text-to-image and #2 on image editing. Google’s Nano Banana Pro is not the runner-up: on text-to-image it ranks between #8 and #11, below its own cheaper sibling Nano Banana 2, which is the photoreal pick. ByteDance’s new Seedream 5.0 Pro (July 8) is a strong multilingual-text and region-precise-editing option, though it has no independent benchmarks yet and is accessed via BytePlus and Magnific rather than a consumer app. Midjourney v8 is the best for stylized art, and Grok Imagine is the only frontier model that allows Spicy Mode adult content.
Gemini Omni Flash is the best for AI video and it is #1 on both independent video boards, leading Arena’s text-to-video leaderboard at 1527 Elo, 45 points clear of second place, and Artificial Analysis’s video arena at 1246.6. It costs roughly $0.10 per second of finished video and generates 10-second clips with conversational editing. ByteDance’s Dreamina Seedance 2.0 is the runner-up at 1482 and actually beats it on image-to-video, and Meta’s Muse Video is third. Veo 3.1 is the pick when you need longer clips, but it is not the quality leader, sitting #6 on Arena’s video board. OpenAI retired the Sora 2 consumer app on April 26, 2026 and its API runs until September 24, 2026. Read our breakdown of Gemini Omni Flash.
GPT-5.6 Sol is the best for hard math and STEM, and this is the best-supported pick on the page: #1 on LiveBench Mathematics (96.2), #1 on LiveBench Reasoning (91.7) and #1 on ARC-AGI-2 (93%) against a 100% human panel. It is included in ChatGPT Pro at $100/month. OpenAI has still not published Sol’s FrontierMath score, so GPT-5.5 Pro’s verified 39.6% on Tier 4 remains the cited OpenAI mark. Qwen 3.7 Max leads competition math at 97.1 on HMMT 2026 February and 44.5 on Apex at a fraction of the cost, with 200 free requests a day. Claude Opus 5 is the alternative for long agentic reasoning chains, leading the Agentic Index at 55.3 and ARC-AGI-3 at 30%.
Grok 4.5 is our creativity pick, and we want to be exact about why: it is the product call, not the quality call. It has the fewest content restrictions of any frontier model and the only native real-time X integration, at $30/month on SuperGrok. It is not the better writer, sitting #33 on EQ-Bench Creative Writing and #41 on Arena’s creative-writing board, losing both to the older Grok 4.20-beta1. If you are choosing on output quality, Claude Fable 5 is #1 on Arena creative writing and Kimi K3 wins EQ-Bench outright. Claude Opus 5 is the alternative for structured long-form creative work, and Gemini 3.1 Pro for multimodal creative.
Fello AI is an AI chatbot for Mac, iPhone, and iPad that lets you use all top AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek in one app, with models updated regularly so you always have the latest. It is $9.99/month with a 4.7-star rating across 27,000+ reviews.
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