AI Model Leaderboard — July 2026
Every major AI model ranked by quality, speed, pricing, and value. Filter by category, sort by any metric, and find the right model for your use case. Live data refreshed regularly with LMSys Arena Elo, official provider pricing, and Artificial Analysis benchmarks.
In short:As of July 2026, Claude Fable 5 leads the AI model leaderboard at 100/100 on our composite quality index, across 45+ models ranked by quality, price, speed, and value. The best pick depends on the workload — sort the table by the metric that matters to you.
Claude Fable 5
100/100
Claude Opus 4.8
99/100
GPT-5.5 Pro
98/100
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July 2026: Top Models, Best Value, Fastest Inference
The July 2026 ranking covers 45 models across LMSys Arena Elo, MMLU Pro, HumanEval, MATH, pricing, and inference speed. Top of the table: Claude Fable 5 at 100/100 quality. The full table below is sortable by any metric. Live data is refreshed regularly from official provider pricing pages and the public Arena.
Top 5 by Quality Index
- Claude Fable 5 — 100/100
- Claude Opus 4.8 — 99/100
- GPT-5.5 Pro — 98/100
- GPT-5.6 — 98/100
- GPT-5.5 — 97/100
Best Price-to-Quality
- DeepSeek V4 Flash — $0.2/1M out
- Gemini 2.0 Flash — $0.4/1M out
- Llama 4 Scout — $0.4/1M out
- Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B — $0.45/1M out
- Grok 3 Mini — $0.5/1M out
See our LMSys Arena deep dive and the monthly release roundup.
| # | Model | Quality | Arena ELO | Speed | Price | Context | Value | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anthropic · Frontier agentic coding & knowledge work | 100 | 1525 | 58 t/s | $10 / $50 | 1M | 3.3 | Jun 2026 |
| 2 | Anthropic · Coding, agents & computer use | 99 | 1512 | 72 t/s | $5 / $25 | 1M | 6.6 | May 2026 |
| 3 | OpenAI · Reasoning at any cost | 98 | 1510 | 68 t/s | $30 / $180 | 1M | 0.9 | Apr 2026 |
| 4 | GPT-5.6 New OpenAI · General frontier reasoning & tools | 98 | 1514 | 96 t/s | $5 / $30 | 400K | 5.6 | Jul 2026 |
| 5 | OpenAI · Frontier general purpose | 97 | 1506 | 70 t/s | $5 / $30 | 1M | 5.5 | Apr 2026 |
| 6 | Gemini 3.2 Pro New Google · Long-context & multimodal | 97 | 1508 | 128 t/s | $2 / $12 | 2M | 13.9 | Jul 2026 |
| 7 | Anthropic · Coding & agentic workflows | 96 | 1505 | 68 t/s | $5 / $25 | 1M | 6.4 | Apr 2026 |
| 8 | Google · Science & long-context | 96 | 1505 | 131 t/s | $2 / $12 | 1M | 13.7 | Apr 2026 |
| 9 | OpenAI · Hard reasoning | 94 | 1370 | 68 t/s | $10 / $40 | 200K | 3.8 | Apr 2025 |
| 10 | Alibaba Cloud · Long autonomous agentic runs | 94 | 1488 | 90 t/s | $2.5 / $7.5 | 1M | 18.8 | May 2026 |
| 11 | xAI · Agentic tasks & real-time info | 93 | 1496 | 83 t/s | $1.25 / $2.5 | 1M | 49.6 | May 2026 |
| 12 | Claude Sonnet 5 New Anthropic · Balanced agents & coding value | 93 | 1479 | 98 t/s | $3 / $15 | 1M | 10.3 | Jun 2026 |
| 13 | Google · Multimodal + value | 92 | 1345 | 87 t/s | $1.25 / $10 | 1M | 16.4 | Mar 2025 |
| 14 | Moonshot AI · Frontier quality at low cost | 92 | 1466 | 48 t/s | $0.73 / $3.49 | 256K | 43.6 | Apr 2026 |
| 15 | DeepSeek · Open-weight reasoning value | 92 | 1471 | 62 t/s | $0.5 / $1.1 | 256K | 115.0 | Jul 2026 |
| 16 | Anthropic · Complex analysis | 91 | 1360 | 52 t/s | $15 / $75 | 200K | 2.0 | May 2025 |
| 17 | DeepSeek R1OSS DeepSeek · Cheap reasoning | 91 | 1350 | 35 t/s | $0.55 / $2.19 | 128K | 66.4 | Jan 2025 |
| 18 | Meta · Open-weight general & multilingual | 91 | 1466 | 76 t/s | $0.8 / $2.4 | 1M | 56.9 | Jun 2026 |
| 19 | DeepSeek · Open-source value leader | 90 | 1467 | 33 t/s | $1.74 / $3.48 | 1M | 34.5 | Apr 2026 |
| 20 | Anthropic · Coding & balance | 90 | 1467 | 73 t/s | $3 / $15 | 1M | 10.0 | Feb 2026 |
| 21 | OpenAI · Long context | 89 | 1310 | 120 t/s | $2 / $8 | 1M | 17.8 | Apr 2025 |
| 22 | MiniMax M3OSS MiniMax · Open-weight agentic coding | 89 | 1455 | 80 t/s | $0.6 / $2.4 | 1M | 59.3 | Jun 2026 |
| 23 | OpenAI · Reasoning & math | 88 | 1305 | 155 t/s | $1.1 / $4.4 | 200K | 32.0 | Jan 2025 |
| 24 | Anthropic · Coding & balance | 88 | 1320 | 95 t/s | $3 / $15 | 200K | 9.8 | May 2025 |
| 25 | GLM-5.1OSS Z.ai (Zhipu AI) · Open-weight agentic & tool use | 88 | 1467 | 48 t/s | $0.98 / $3.08 | 200K | 43.3 | Apr 2026 |
| 26 | xAI · Real-time info | 87 | 1330 | 82 t/s | $3 / $15 | 131K | 9.7 | Feb 2025 |
| 27 | DeepSeek V3OSS DeepSeek · Best open-source value | 86 | 1310 | 62 t/s | $0.27 / $1.1 | 128K | 125.5 | Mar 2025 |
| 28 | Alibaba Cloud · Multilingual & APAC | 86 | 1448 | 124 t/s | $1.4 / $5.6 | 256K | 24.6 | Apr 2026 |
| 29 | OpenAI · General purpose | 85 | 1285 | 109 t/s | $2.5 / $10 | 128K | 13.6 | May 2024 |
| 30 | Meta · Open-source value | 80 | 1260 | 135 t/s | $0.2 / $0.6 | 1M | 200.0 | Apr 2025 |
| 31 | Qwen 2.5 72BOSS Alibaba Cloud · Open-source flagship | 80 | 1255 | 85 t/s | $0.3 / $0.9 | 131K | 133.3 | Sep 2024 |
| 32 | DeepSeek · Cheap-and-fast cascade tier | 80 | 1410 | 105 t/s | $0.1 / $0.2 | 1M | 533.3 | Apr 2026 |
| 33 | Mistral AI · Multilingual | 79 | 1250 | 78 t/s | $2 / $6 | 128K | 19.8 | Nov 2024 |
| 34 | xAI · Budget reasoning | 78 | 1275 | 165 t/s | $0.3 / $0.5 | 131K | 195.0 | Feb 2025 |
| 35 | Perplexity · Search + citations | 78 | — | 65 t/s | $3 / $15 | 200K | 8.7 | Feb 2025 |
| 36 | Mistral AI · Code generation | 76 | — | 195 t/s | $0.3 / $0.9 | 256K | 126.7 | Jan 2025 |
| 37 | Mistral AI · Open multimodal | 76 | 1361 | 158 t/s | Self-host | 256K | — | Apr 2026 |
| 38 | Anthropic · Speed & cost | 75 | 1230 | 172 t/s | $0.8 / $4 | 200K | 31.3 | Oct 2024 |
| 39 | Gemma 4 27BOSS Google · Self-hosted general purpose | 75 | 1351 | 142 t/s | Self-host | 128K | — | Apr 2026 |
| 40 | Google · Fastest + cheapest | 74 | 1240 | 244 t/s | $0.1 / $0.4 | 1M | 296.0 | Feb 2025 |
| 41 | Alibaba Cloud · Open-source coding | 74 | — | 125 t/s | $0.15 / $0.45 | 131K | 246.7 | Nov 2024 |
| 42 | OpenAI · High throughput | 72 | 1216 | 183 t/s | $0.15 / $0.6 | 128K | 192.0 | Jul 2024 |
| 43 | Meta · Longest context | 71 | 1195 | 198 t/s | $0.15 / $0.4 | 10M | 258.2 | Apr 2025 |
| 44 | Amazon · AWS ecosystem | 70 | — | 110 t/s | $0.8 / $3.2 | 300K | 35.0 | Dec 2024 |
| 45 | Cohere · Enterprise RAG | 68 | 1170 | 72 t/s | $2.5 / $10 | 128K | 10.9 | Aug 2024 |
LLM Leaderboard July 2026
Large language models ranked by LMSys Arena Elo, MMLU, HumanEval, MATH, pricing, and tokens-per-second. Text-only view.
LM Leaderboard July 2026
Language model rankings: LMArena Elo, price-to-Elo ratio, and open-weight vs closed-source comparison.
LMSys Arena Leaderboard July 2026
LMArena (formerly LMSys Chatbot Arena) tracker — pairwise human preference Elo scores, refreshed as the public arena publishes.
Image Model Leaderboard 2026
Generative AI image and video models — Imagen 4, Flux 2, DALL-E 4, Stable Diffusion 4 Ultra, Sora 2 ranked by quality and cost.
Coding Model Leaderboard 2026
AI coding assistants ranked: Claude Opus, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V4, plus HumanEval and SWE-Bench scores.
Vendor Lock-in Leaderboard 2026
AI vendors ranked by portability — license, weight availability, fine-tuning openness, and exit cost score.
How We Rank AI Models
Our leaderboard uses a composite quality index that combines three key benchmarks: MMLU Pro (measuring knowledge and reasoning across 57 subjects), HumanEval (measuring code generation ability), and MATH (measuring mathematical problem-solving). Scores are normalized to a 0-100 scale and cross-referenced against LMSYS Chatbot Arena ELO ratings for real-world validation.
We track speed (tokens per second), time-to-first-token (TTFT), pricing, and context window size to give you a complete picture. The Value Score divides quality by cost, showing you which models deliver the most capability per dollar.
Key Trends in AI Model Performance
- July 2026 refresh: five new models joined the board — OpenAI's GPT-5.6 (AA Index 61.0, effectively free over GPT-5.5), Google's Gemini 3.2 Pro (2M context, still $2/$12), Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 (Opus-class coding at a third of the price), and two open-weight releases, DeepSeek V4.5 (MIT) and Meta's Llama 5
- A new frontier #1: Claude Opus 4.8 (May 28, 2026) tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, edging out GPT-5.5, with standout gains in coding (SWE-bench Pro 69.2%) and computer-use agents (Online-Mind2Web 84%). Alibaba's Qwen 3.7 Max debuts as the highest-ranked Chinese model at #5
- Open weights closing the gap: DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM-5.1, and Kimi K2.6 now trade blows with closed frontier models on reasoning and coding — at a fraction of the price
- Reasoning is built in: Frontier models like GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Gemini 3.1 Pro ship extended thinking by default, while deep-research variants trade latency for accuracy on the hardest tasks
- Million-token context is standard: 1M-token windows are now table stakes for flagship models across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI
- Price keeps falling: Fast- and flash-tier models pair strong quality with low latency, while launch promos (such as DeepSeek V4) push frontier-class quality below $1 per million tokens
Choosing the Right Model
There is no single "best" model — it depends on your use case. For most applications, a model routing approach works best: route simple queries to fast, cheap models and complex queries to frontier models. This gives you the best of both worlds — low cost and high quality.