AI Models Leaderboard, September 2026
Large language models ranked by LMSys Arena Elo, MMLU, HumanEval, MATH, pricing, and inference speed. Refreshed monthly with live data from official provider pricing pages, Artificial Analysis, and the Arena.
In short:As of September 2026, Claude Mythos 5 tops the AI models leaderboard at 1531 Arena Elo, across 56+ models compared on quality, cost, and speed. Per-task leaders differ: check the column for your use case (text, coding, reasoning, or value).
Which AI model should you use in September 2026?
The leaderboard below ranks 56 frontier and frontier-adjacent models on a single normalized quality index, but the practical answer is task-dependent: pick the leading code/agentic model for coding, the leading long-context model for science and retrieval, the leading chat model for general use, and the open-weights leader when budget matters. Multi-model routing is now the default architectural choice for serious production deployments.
| # | 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 · Ceiling capability (limited access) | 100 | 1531 | 56 t/s | $10 / $50 | 1M | 3.3 | Jun 2026 |
| 3 | Anthropic · Frontier agentic coding & reasoning | 99 | 1522 | 74 t/s | $5 / $25 | 1M | 6.6 | Jul 2026 |
| 4 | Anthropic · Coding, agents & computer use | 98 | 1512 | 72 t/s | $5 / $25 | 1M | 6.5 | May 2026 |
| 5 | OpenAI · General frontier reasoning & tools | 98 | 1514 | 96 t/s | $5 / $30 | 1M | 5.6 | Jul 2026 |
| 6 | OpenAI · Frontier general purpose | 97 | 1506 | 70 t/s | $5 / $30 | 1M | 5.5 | Apr 2026 |
| 7 | Kimi K3OSS Moonshot AI · Open-weight coding frontier | 97 | 1500 | 55 t/s | $3 / $15 | 1M | 10.8 | Jul 2026 |
| 8 | OpenAI · Reasoning at any cost | 96 | 1510 | 68 t/s | $30 / $180 | 1M | 0.9 | Apr 2026 |
| 9 | Anthropic · Coding & agentic workflows | 96 | 1505 | 68 t/s | $5 / $25 | 1M | 6.4 | Apr 2026 |
| 10 | Google · Science & long-context | 96 | 1505 | 131 t/s | $2 / $12 | 1M | 13.7 | Apr 2026 |
| 11 | Qwen3.8 MaxOSS Alibaba Cloud · Multimodal APAC frontier (hosted); text-only open weights | 96 | 1491 | 86 t/s | $2 / $6 | 1M | 24.0 | Aug 2026 |
| 12 | OpenAI · Hard reasoning | 94 | 1370 | 68 t/s | $2 / $8 | 200K | 18.8 | Apr 2025 |
| 13 | Alibaba Cloud · Long autonomous agentic runs | 94 | 1488 | 90 t/s | $2.5 / $7.5 | 1M | 18.8 | May 2026 |
| 14 | xAI · Cheap output tokens & real-time info | 94 | 1499 | 88 t/s | $2 / $6 | 500K | 23.5 | Jul 2026 |
| 15 | xAI · Agentic tasks & real-time info | 93 | 1496 | 83 t/s | $1.25 / $2.5 | 1M | 49.6 | May 2026 |
| 16 | OpenAI · Default production tier | 93 | 1489 | 118 t/s | $2 / $12 | 1M | 13.3 | Jul 2026 |
| 17 | Anthropic · Balanced agents & coding value | 93 | 1479 | 98 t/s | $3 / $15 | 1M | 10.3 | Jun 2026 |
| 18 | Google · Multimodal + value | 92 | 1345 | 87 t/s | $1.25 / $10 | 1M | 16.4 | Mar 2025 |
| 19 | Moonshot AI · Frontier quality at low cost | 92 | 1466 | 48 t/s | $0.73 / $3.49 | 256K | 43.6 | Apr 2026 |
| 20 | Anthropic · Complex analysis | 91 | 1360 | 52 t/s | $15 / $75 | 200K | 2.0 | May 2025 |
| 21 | DeepSeek R1OSS DeepSeek · Cheap reasoning | 91 | 1350 | 35 t/s | $0.55 / $2.19 | 128K | 66.4 | Jan 2025 |
| 22 | GLM-5.2OSS Z.ai (Zhipu AI) · Fastest self-hostable frontier model | 91 | 1483 | 168 t/s | $1.4 / $4.4 | 1M | 31.4 | Jun 2026 |
| 23 | Anthropic · Coding & balance | 90 | 1467 | 73 t/s | $3 / $15 | 1M | 10.0 | Feb 2026 |
| 24 | Google · Fast multimodal at mid-tier price | 90 | 1481 | 148 t/s | $0.75 / $3.75 | 1M | 40.0 | Jul 2026 |
| 25 | OpenAI · Long context | 89 | 1310 | 120 t/s | $2 / $8 | 1M | 17.8 | Apr 2025 |
| 26 | DeepSeek · Cheap frontier-adjacent tokens (GA build) | 89 | 1461 | 62 t/s | $0.66 / $1.98 | 1M | 67.4 | Aug 2026 |
| 27 | MiniMax M3OSS MiniMax · Open-weight agentic coding | 89 | 1455 | 80 t/s | $0.6 / $2.4 | 1M | 59.3 | Jun 2026 |
| 28 | OpenAI · Reasoning & math | 88 | 1305 | 155 t/s | $1.1 / $4.4 | 200K | 32.0 | Jan 2025 |
| 29 | Anthropic · Coding & balance | 88 | 1320 | 95 t/s | $3 / $15 | 200K | 9.8 | May 2025 |
| 30 | 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 |
| 31 | xAI · Real-time info | 87 | 1330 | 82 t/s | $3 / $15 | 131K | 9.7 | Feb 2025 |
| 32 | DeepSeek V3OSS DeepSeek · Best open-source value | 86 | 1310 | 62 t/s | $0.27 / $1.1 | 128K | 125.5 | Mar 2025 |
| 33 | Alibaba Cloud · Multilingual & APAC | 86 | 1448 | 124 t/s | $1.4 / $5.6 | 256K | 24.6 | Apr 2026 |
| 34 | OpenAI · General purpose | 85 | 1285 | 109 t/s | $2.5 / $10 | 128K | 13.6 | May 2024 |
| 35 | DeepSeek · Cheapest tokens, period | 84 | 1441 | 105 t/s | $0.14 / $0.28 | 1M | 400.0 | Apr 2026 |
| 36 | OpenAI · High-volume cheap frontier-family | 83 | 1436 | 186 t/s | $0.2 / $1.2 | 1M | 118.6 | Jul 2026 |
| 37 | Meta · Open-source value | 80 | 1260 | 135 t/s | $0.2 / $0.6 | 1M | 200.0 | Apr 2025 |
| 38 | Qwen 2.5 72BOSS Alibaba Cloud · Open-source flagship | 80 | 1255 | 85 t/s | $0.3 / $0.9 | 131K | 133.3 | Sep 2024 |
| 39 | Qwen3.8 27BOSS Alibaba Cloud · Locally-runnable open-weight (~17GB VRAM at 4-bit) | 80 | — | — | Self-host | 262K | , | Aug 2026 |
| 40 | Mistral AI · Multilingual | 79 | 1250 | 78 t/s | $2 / $6 | 128K | 19.8 | Nov 2024 |
| 41 | Google · High-volume cheap multimodal | 79 | 1418 | 192 t/s | $0.3 / $2.5 | 1M | 56.4 | Jul 2026 |
| 42 | NVIDIA · Efficient single-GPU deployment, 1M context | 79 | — | — | Self-host | 1M | , | Aug 2026 |
| 43 | xAI · Budget reasoning | 78 | 1275 | 165 t/s | $0.3 / $0.5 | 131K | 195.0 | Feb 2025 |
| 44 | Perplexity · Search + citations | 78 | — | 65 t/s | $3 / $15 | 200K | 8.7 | Feb 2025 |
| 45 | Mistral AI · Code generation | 76 | — | 195 t/s | $0.3 / $0.9 | 256K | 126.7 | Jan 2025 |
| 46 | NVIDIA · Open multimodal | 76 | 1361 | 158 t/s | Self-host | 256K | , | Apr 2026 |
| 47 | Hunyuan Hy3OSS Tencent · Long-context retrieval & agentic search, no license restrictions | 76 | — | — | Self-host | 256K | , | Jul 2026 |
| 48 | Anthropic · Speed & cost | 75 | 1230 | 172 t/s | $0.8 / $4 | 200K | 31.3 | Oct 2024 |
| 49 | Gemma 4 27BOSS Google · Self-hosted general purpose | 75 | 1351 | 142 t/s | Self-host | 128K | , | Apr 2026 |
| 50 | Google · Fastest + cheapest | 74 | 1240 | 244 t/s | $0.1 / $0.4 | 1M | 296.0 | Feb 2025 |
| 51 | Alibaba Cloud · Open-source coding | 74 | — | 125 t/s | $0.15 / $0.45 | 131K | 246.7 | Nov 2024 |
| 52 | Ant Group · Efficient MoE alternative to trillion-param flagships | 74 | — | — | Self-host | 256K | , | Aug 2026 |
| 53 | OpenAI · High throughput | 72 | 1216 | 183 t/s | $0.15 / $0.6 | 128K | 192.0 | Jul 2024 |
| 54 | Meta · Longest context | 71 | 1195 | 198 t/s | $0.15 / $0.4 | 10M | 258.2 | Apr 2025 |
| 55 | Amazon · AWS ecosystem | 70 | — | 110 t/s | $0.8 / $3.2 | 300K | 35.0 | Dec 2024 |
| 56 | Cohere · Enterprise RAG | 68 | 1170 | 72 t/s | $2.5 / $10 | 128K | 10.9 | Aug 2024 |
How the LLM leaderboard works
We pull official provider pricing every 24 hours, Artificial Analysis benchmark snapshots weekly, and LMSys Arena Elo as it publishes. The composite quality index is a 0-100 normalization over MMLU Pro, HumanEval, and MATH, weighted by recency and cross-validated against Arena Elo. We do not accept vendor-supplied numbers without an independent reference.
Where the leaderboard is wrong
No leaderboard predicts your production accuracy. LMSys Arena rewards style and short-conversation polish; a top-Arena model can still under-perform on your specific function-calling schema or long-context retrieval workload. Build an internal eval harness before you commit. See our LMArena Elo explained and LLM routing writeups for the deep-dive.
Related rankings
- AI Model Leaderboard: same data, broader entry point
- Models Leaderboard
- GenAI Leaderboard
- AI Vendor Lock-in Leaderboard