Our Top AI Model

The Picks

1. #1

   Claude Fable 5

   Best overall (run at medium effort)

   Anthropic's Mythos-class model made safe for general use, addressable as claude-fable-5 at $10/M input and $50/M output tokens. SpaceXAI's August 12, 2026 launch table shows Fable 5 Max leading the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 62 and CursorBench v3.2 at 70.5%, and Anthropic cites Cognition's FrontierCode evaluation placing Fable 5 highest among frontier models even at medium effort. Run it at medium as your default and step up for the hardest work. Know the caveats: safety classifiers fall back a small share of requests to Opus (under 5% of sessions, per Anthropic), and all Mythos-class traffic carries a mandatory 30-day retention policy.

2. #2

   GPT-5.6 Sol

   Best for long-horizon coding agents (run at xhigh)

   OpenAI's flagship, described by OpenAI as a step function better than GPT-5.5. In SpaceXAI's August 12 launch table, Sol at Max effort leads DeepSWE v1.1 at 73% and Terminal-Bench v3.0 at 34.6%, the two rows that matter most if your workload is long-horizon software engineering in a terminal. API pricing is $5/M input and $30/M output tokens at short context. Sol exposes reasoning effort from none through max; run agent work at xhigh, and hold max for when quality outweighs latency and cost.

3. #3

   Grok 4.6

   Best price-to-capability

   SpaceXAI's August 12, 2026 release matches GPT-5.6 Sol Max on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (61 vs 61) at $2/M input and $6/M output tokens below 200,000 prompt tokens. It is live in Cursor and Grok Build with 2x included usage for the first week. Terminal-Bench v3.0 (26%) is the caution row: bake it off on your own terminal-heavy tasks before making it a default.

4. #4

   Gemini 3.1 Pro

   Best long context

   Handles massive documents and codebases with multi-million-token windows. Still leads ARC-AGI-1 Verified (98.0%) and BrowseComp (85.9%). Ideal for tasks that require ingesting and reasoning over entire repositories or long documents.

5. #5

   Claude Sonnet 5

   Best value

   Anthropic's mid-tier and its most agentic Sonnet yet: it plans, drives browsers and terminals, and runs autonomously at a level Anthropic says recently required larger models. Pricing is permanent at $2/M input and $10/M output tokens, and it is the default model for Free and Pro plans. The smart choice for high-volume work where cost and latency matter more than peak capability.

6. #6

   DeepSeek R1

   Best open-weight

   Competitive reasoning at lower cost, fully open. The leading option for teams that need to self-host or want complete transparency into model weights.

How They Compare

Figures are from SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 launch table (August 12, 2026), which reports the best of self-reported or publicly available results for competitors. Scores are at each model's listed effort setting, not our recommended day-to-day settings.

Changelog

• August 12, 2026: Claude Fable 5 promoted to the top pick, recommended at medium reasoning effort, with GPT-5.6 Sol at xhigh as the co-pick for terminal-heavy, long-horizon coding agents. Benchmarks re-based on SpaceXAI's August 12 Grok 4.6 launch table. Grok 4.6 added at #3 for price-to-capability; Claude Sonnet 5 replaces Sonnet 4.6 as the value pick; GPT-5.5, GPT-5.5 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.7 rotate out, superseded by GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5.
• April 23, 2026: GPT-5.5 promoted to top overall model on its April 23 launch. State-of-the-art on Terminal-Bench 2.0 (82.7%), GDPval (84.9%), OSWorld-Verified (78.7%), FrontierMath Tier 4 (35.4%), and CyberGym (81.8%). Matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency while delivering higher intelligence and using fewer tokens on equivalent Codex tasks. Claude Opus 4.7 moves to #2 as the pick for SWE-Bench Pro-style work. GPT-5.5 Pro added as a separate tier for the hardest questions.
• April 16, 2026: Claude Opus 4.7 promoted to top model on its April 16 launch. Notable gains on the hardest software engineering tasks, state-of-the-art on Finance Agent and GDPval-AA at that time, plus higher-resolution vision (2,576 pixels on the long edge) and a new xhigh effort level. Pricing unchanged from Opus 4.6 at $5/M input and $25/M output.
• March 2026: Initial picks published. Claude Opus 4.6 selected as top model.

Frequently Asked Questions