Week 39, 2026Published September 25, 2026
AI Model Power Rankings
Opus 5.5 takes the crown in the busiest launch week of the year. Tuesday, September 22 brought five launches in one day: Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 Pro and Flash. That's enough to reshuffle the whole board. This is our debut edition, so there are no movement arrows yet. From next week, every change gets tracked.
A 'fast' model sitting in the LMArena top 10, above Google's own Pro model. Grab the intro price before it doubles on January 1.
Still in preview, and now beaten by its cheaper Flash sibling. Google needs a new Pro model.
01Power Rankings
The best general-purpose AI models right now, with quality, price and momentum rolled into one score.
| # | Movement± | Model | Price / 1M tokens | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | · | Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic Top of the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and the best coder on the board, for less than Opus 5 cost. A new champion on day one. |
$4 in / $20 out | 97 |
| 2 | · | Claude Fable 5.1Anthropic Still the heavyweight, leading the Arena agent leaderboard. You pay 2.5x Opus 5.5's price for the last few percent. |
$10 in / $50 out | 95 |
| 3 | · | GPT-6 AstraOpenAI OpenAI's best, and still #1 on automation benchmarks. It lost the index lead to Opus 5.5 this week. |
$10 in / $50 out | 94 |
| 4 | · | GPT-6 SolOpenAI The value story of the week: Astra-style training at $2/$10, with roughly half as many mistakes as GPT-5.6 Sol. |
$2 in / $10 out | 92 |
| 5 | · | Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle Arena top 10 for 75 cents per million input tokens, which is absurd value until January. |
$0.75 in / $3.75 out | 90 |
| 6 | · | Muse Spark 1.3Meta Meta's quiet contender. Voters love how it talks, and the price didn't budge. |
$1.25 in / $4.25 out | 89 |
| 7 | · | Gemini 3.1 ProGoogle Still good, but lapped by its own Flash sibling. We want to see a Gemini 4 Pro. |
$2 in / $12 out | 87 |
| 8 | · | Kimi K3Moonshot AI The highest-ranked model outside the US frontier labs. It deserves more attention than it gets. |
Not published | 86 |
| 9 | · | Grok 4.7xAI A steady update, and cheap output tokens help. Agentic coding is still well behind the leaders. |
$2 in / $6 out | 84 |
| 10 | · | GLM-5.3Z.ai · open The best model you can download and run yourself, if you have the hardware for 753B parameters. |
Not published | 84 |
| 11 | · | GPT-6 LunaOpenAI Not a genius, but at $0.10 per million input tokens it'll power half the chatbots on the internet by Christmas. |
$0.1 in / $0.5 out | 82 |
| 12 | · | Qwen3.8-FlashAlibaba Cheap, multilingual and now multimodal through Omni-Flash. A sensible budget pick. |
$0.15 in / $0.47 out | 78 |
02Coding
For developers and 'vibe coders': writing, fixing and shipping real software.
| # | Movement± | Model | Price / 1M tokens | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | · | Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 and #1 on Arena WebDev. It's the default pick for coding. |
$4 in / $20 out | 98 |
| 2 | · | GPT-6 AstraOpenAI 57.9% on the same benchmark, and strongest when the job involves driving a terminal. |
$10 in / $50 out | 94 |
| 3 | · | Claude Fable 5.1Anthropic 55.8% there. It's brilliant, but Opus 5.5 is both better and cheaper for most code. |
$10 in / $50 out | 93 |
| 4 | · | GPT-6 SolOpenAI A huge jump over GPT-5.6 Sol, and it's live in Codex and GitHub Copilot. |
$2 in / $10 out | 90 |
| 5 | · | Kimi K3Moonshot AI A popular choice for cheap coding agents. |
Not published | 84 |
| 6 | · | GLM-5.3Z.ai · open The open-weight coding pick. |
Not published | 83 |
| 7 | · | Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle Great for quick edits and autocomplete-style work. |
$0.75 in / $3.75 out | 82 |
| 8 | · | Grok 4.7xAI 38% on Terminal-Bench 4.0. Fine for snippets, not for agents. |
$2 in / $6 out | 74 |
03Best Value
The most capability per dollar. If you're building an app or watching a budget, start here.
| # | Movement± | Model | Price / 1M tokens | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | · | Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle Top-10 quality at Flash prices, so enjoy it before January. |
$0.75 in / $3.75 out | 95 |
| 2 | · | GPT-6 LunaOpenAI $0.10 / $0.50, and the GPT-6 lineage behind it shows. |
$0.1 in / $0.5 out | 93 |
| 3 | · | GPT-6 SolOpenAI Near-frontier quality for a fifth of Astra's price. |
$2 in / $10 out | 91 |
| 4 | · | Muse Spark 1.3Meta Strong conversation at $1.25 / $4.25, and the Contributor tier is even cheaper. |
$1.25 in / $4.25 out | 88 |
| 5 | · | Qwen3.8-FlashAlibaba $0.15 / $0.47 with multilingual strength. |
$0.15 in / $0.47 out | 86 |
| 6 | · | Mercury 2.5Inception Very fast diffusion text generation at $0.20 / $0.75. |
$0.2 in / $0.75 out | 80 |
| 7 | · | Grok 4.7xAI Its $6 output tokens are among the cheapest at this quality level. |
$2 in / $6 out | 78 |
04Open-Weight Watch
Models you can download, run privately and customise.
| # | Movement± | Model | Price / 1M tokens | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | · | GLM-5.3Z.ai · open The strongest open-weight model right now, with a custom license, so read it. |
Not published | 92 |
| 2 | · | MiMo-V2.6-ProXiaomi · open Xiaomi keeps shipping. It launched this week, so treat it as provisional. |
Not published | 85 |
| 3 | · | Ternary Bonsai 2 27BPrismML · open Apache 2.0 and small enough for real-world hardware. |
Not published | 78 |
05Image Generation
Making pictures from text, based on LMArena text-to-image votes plus our hands-on notes.
| # | Movement± | Model | Price / 1M tokens | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | · | GPT Image 2.5OpenAI It holds the top three spots on the leaderboard. Not a contest right now. |
— | 97 |
| 2 | · | MAI-Image 2.6Microsoft AI Microsoft's in-house model is the best non-OpenAI option. |
— | 88 |
| 3 | · | Reve 2.1Reve The indie favourite for aesthetics. |
— | 85 |
| 4 | · | Grok Imagine Image 2.0xAI Top six even on its low setting. |
— | 84 |
| 5 | · | Gemini 3.1 Flash ImageGoogle Ranks lower on raw generation, but it's the best for editing an image through conversation. |
— | 82 |
| 6 | · | Seedream 5.0 ProByteDance Powers the CapCut/Dreamina creator ecosystem. |
— | 80 |
06Video Generation
Text-to-video, and what to use now that Sora is gone.
| # | Movement± | Model | Price / 1M tokens | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | · | Gemini Omni 1.1 FlashGoogle #1 on LMArena text-to-video at 1516, though with only a few votes so far. |
— | 95 |
| 2 | · | Veo 3.1Google The safest all-rounder, with native audio and 4K. |
— | 92 |
| 3 | · | FLUX 3 VideoBlack Forest Labs Black Forest Labs arrives in video at #3. |
— | 90 |
| 4 | · | Kling 3.0Kuaishou The value king at about 11–14 cents per second, plus storyboard mode. |
— | 89 |
| 5 | · | Seedance 2.5ByteDance The best realistic human motion for creators. |
— | 88 |
| 6 | · | Grok Imagine Video 1.5xAI Fast and fun, ranking #4 in agent mode. |
— | 86 |
| 7 | · | Wan 3.0Alibaba The tinkerer's pick. |
— | 84 |
| 8 | · | Runway Gen-4.5Runway Professionals still choose it for camera control. |
— | 82 |
The Wire · what happened this week
OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol ($2/$10) and GPT-6 Luna ($0.10/$0.50) across ChatGPT, Codex and the API.
Xiaomi open-sources MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash.
xAI ships Grok 4.7 at the same $2/$6 price as 4.6.
Alibaba adds Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, a multimodal model priced at $0.15/$0.47.
PrismML releases Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, a compressed model with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license.
Moonshot previews Kimi K2.8, and Sakana AI launches Fugu Max.
Scores are our editorial blend of public leaderboards (LMArena, Artificial Analysis and published benchmarks), price and hands-on use. Read the methodology →