List of the Top Foundation Models for Cheaper Inference in 2026

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s advanced Opus model designed for high-value coding, knowledge work, problem-solving, automation, scientific research, and everyday AI workflows. The model is positioned as a thoughtful and proactive system that approaches the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price. Anthropic says Claude Opus 5 delivers greatly improved performance for the same cost as Opus 4.8, with base pricing of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The model supports effort settings that allow customers to optimize for deeper intelligence or conserve tokens for faster and cheaper results. Claude Opus 5 performs especially well on software engineering evaluations, including tasks that require debugging, code generation, root-cause analysis, test creation, and multi-step implementation. It also shows strong results on knowledge work, business automation, computer use, novel problem solving, and research-heavy tasks. Anthropic highlights that Opus 5 is better at checking its own work, iterating until it succeeds, and building supporting tools when a task requires it. The model improves on Opus 4.8 across life sciences evaluations, including structural biology, organic chemistry, bioinformatics, molecular structure inference, and protein function tasks. Claude Opus 5 includes alignment and safety protections that aim to allow beneficial cybersecurity and biology use cases while restricting riskier exploit generation, penetration testing, and certain autonomous misuse scenarios. It is available on Claude Max as the default model, on Claude Pro as the strongest model, and through the Claude API as claude-opus-5, with a Fast mode that runs around 2.5 times the default speed.

Claude Fable 5 is a frontier AI model developed by Anthropic to deliver advanced reasoning, coding, research, and multimodal capabilities for enterprise and professional users. As a Mythos-class model adapted for broad availability, it combines high-level intelligence with safety-focused deployment controls. The model excels at software engineering tasks, including large-scale code analysis, migrations, debugging, architecture review, and autonomous project execution. Claude Fable 5 also demonstrates strong performance in knowledge work, helping users analyze documents, evaluate financial information, interpret charts and tables, conduct research, and generate actionable insights. Its vision capabilities enable sophisticated image understanding, visual reasoning, and screenshot-based analysis. The model supports long-context workflows and persistent memory utilization, allowing it to work effectively on extended tasks involving millions of tokens of information. Anthropic has implemented a layered safety framework that includes specialized classifiers for cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillation-related requests. When these areas are detected, requests may be handled by a different model with stricter operational controls. Claude Fable 5 is available through the Claude API and Anthropic’s product ecosystem, providing developers and enterprises with access to advanced AI-powered assistance. The model is designed to enhance productivity, accelerate research, improve software development workflows, and support complex analytical tasks. By combining powerful reasoning, multimodal intelligence, and enterprise-focused safeguards, Claude Fable 5 enables organizations to scale AI adoption responsibly and effectively.

GPT-5.6 Terra is a balanced model in OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 series, designed to provide strong performance for everyday work while keeping costs lower than the flagship Sol tier. The GPT-5.6 family includes Sol for the highest capability, Terra for balanced work, and Luna for fast and affordable use cases. Terra is positioned as a practical option for developers, businesses, and enterprise teams that need capable reasoning, coding, automation, research support, and defensive security assistance without always using the most expensive model. According to the pasted preview text, Terra offers competitive performance to GPT-5.5 while being 2x cheaper. It appears in GPT-5.6 benchmark previews for Terminal-Bench 2.1, GeneBench v1, ExploitBench, and ExploitGym, showing that the model is intended for technical and long-horizon tasks as well as general work. Terra can support coding workflows that require planning, iteration, command-line reasoning, and tool coordination. It can also support legitimate cybersecurity workflows such as code review, vulnerability research, patch development, debugging, security education, and defensive testing. The model is developed with layered safeguards matched to its capabilities, including trained refusals, real-time checks, misuse classifiers, monitoring, enforcement, and account-level review. OpenAI also describes automated red-teaming and third-party human expert red-teaming as part of the broader GPT-5.6 safety process. Terra is priced below Sol in the pasted API pricing structure, with lower input and output costs per 1 million tokens. GPT-5.6 Terra helps organizations use a capable GPT-5.6 model for production workflows where performance, cost efficiency, and safety controls all matter.

Gemini 3.7 Flash is Google’s intelligent workhorse model built for coding, agents, software engineering, knowledge work, web development, and complex business workflows. The model delivers substantial improvements across debugging, issue resolution, first-pass code accuracy, and production-ready code generation. Developers can use Gemini 3.7 Flash to move from prompt to working implementation with fewer revisions and stronger reliability. Its software engineering capabilities make it useful for resolving issues, generating code, improving applications, and supporting agentic coding workflows. For web development, the model can create more functional layouts and feature-complete applications in fewer prompts. It also performs well when following design requirements from screenshots, images, visual references, and complete design systems. Gemini 3.7 Flash supports knowledge-heavy domains such as finance, law, and biosciences with improved reasoning and accuracy. Its complex-document understanding helps users analyze dense materials, extract meaning, and work through specialized information more effectively. The model also supports real-world workflow automation, making it useful for business processes that require structured reasoning and task execution. Multimodal capabilities extend its use cases to interactive web experiences, data stories, robotics, and dynamically generated 3D content. By combining coding strength, agentic execution, web development capability, design adherence, document intelligence, multimodal reasoning, and workflow automation, Gemini 3.7 Flash helps teams build and execute more complex work.

GLM-5.2 is a powerful AI foundation model created to help developers and organizations handle advanced reasoning, coding, automation, and agent-based workflows. It is designed for complex system engineering tasks where an AI model needs to understand goals, follow multi-step instructions, and support technical execution. The model can be used for software development, code analysis, documentation support, research assistance, workflow automation, and intelligent application development. GLM-5.2 is especially valuable for long-context tasks because it can work with large amounts of information across extended prompts, files, or conversations. This makes it useful for reviewing large codebases, summarizing technical materials, generating structured outputs, and supporting detailed problem-solving. Its mixture-of-experts architecture helps deliver strong performance while using active model resources more efficiently. Development teams can use GLM-5.2 to improve productivity by reducing repetitive work and accelerating technical decision-making. Businesses can also use it to power AI assistants, internal automation tools, research platforms, and customer-facing intelligent systems. The model’s focus on agentic capabilities allows it to support workflows that require planning, reasoning, and task completion rather than basic response generation. GLM-5.2 can help organizations build smarter products while giving technical teams a more capable AI partner for demanding projects. It is a strong option for companies that want scalable AI support across engineering, research, automation, and digital transformation initiatives.

GPT-5.6 Luna is the lowest-cost model in OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 family, built for fast and affordable AI assistance across everyday and technical workflows. The GPT-5.6 lineup includes Sol as the flagship model, Terra as the balanced model for everyday work, and Luna as the efficient model for users who need strong capability at lower cost. Luna is intended for developers, businesses, and teams that need scalable AI for coding help, workflow automation, research support, analysis, customer-facing applications, and high-volume API usage. In the pasted preview text, Luna is presented as part of the same GPT-5.6 release process and benchmark set as Sol and Terra. It appears in evaluations for command-line coding workflows, long-horizon biology tasks, ExploitBench, and ExploitGym, indicating that it is designed to handle more than simple chat use cases. The model is priced at a lower per-token rate than Sol and Terra, making it more suitable for applications where cost efficiency is a major priority. GPT-5.6 Luna also supports the new GPT-5.6 prompt caching approach, including explicit cache breakpoints, a 30-minute minimum cache life, cache writes billed above the uncached input rate, and discounted cached-input reads. Like the rest of the GPT-5.6 family, Luna is developed with layered safeguards matched to model capability. These safeguards include trained refusals for prohibited cyber assistance, real-time misuse classifiers, paused generation for higher-risk cases, account-level review, monitoring, enforcement, automated red-teaming, and third-party human expert red-teaming. Luna is expected to support legitimate defensive and technical workflows such as code review, debugging, patch development, security education, and defensive testing while making prohibited misuse more difficult and detectable. GPT-5.6 Luna helps organizations deploy GPT-5.6-class AI where speed, affordability, scalability, and safe production use are the most important requirements.

Grok 4.5 is an advanced AI model from SpaceXAI built for coding, agentic tasks, engineering workflows, and knowledge work. It is presented as SpaceXAI’s strongest model to date and is designed to perform well on real-world software engineering tasks rather than only short benchmark prompts. The model was trained on datasets spanning coding, science, engineering, and math, with heavy investment in data filtering, deduplication, quality scoring, and domain-focused selection. Its reinforcement learning process focuses on multi-step software engineering, technical problem solving, automated grading, model-based evaluation, and long-running agentic rollouts. Grok 4.5 can work on challenging development tasks across languages and environments, including Rust, C/C++, terminal workflows, debugging, bug fixing, and end-to-end app generation. The model is also capable of building polished applications from a single prompt, such as interactive simulations, modern interfaces, and functional web experiences. In addition to coding, Grok 4.5 supports knowledge work inside Grok Build, including Excel model creation, web research, multi-sheet formulas, PowerPoint slide design, native diagram creation, and Word document drafting. It is designed for speed and efficiency, with fast serving, strong token efficiency, and pricing based on input and output token usage. Developers can access Grok 4.5 through the SpaceXAI API console, Cursor, and Grok Build, making it usable across coding tools, productivity environments, and custom applications. The model is positioned for teams that need intelligent technical execution at a lower cost and with fewer steps than some competing frontier models. By combining engineering-focused training, agentic reasoning, fast inference, office productivity skills, and broad developer access, Grok 4.5 gives users a capable model for building, automating, debugging, researching, and shipping complex work.

Claude Sonnet 5 is Anthropic's latest AI model engineered to deliver highly capable agentic performance for developers, enterprises, and organizations building next-generation AI applications. The model expands the capabilities of the Sonnet family by enabling autonomous planning, browser interaction, terminal usage, tool calling, coding assistance, and complex reasoning while remaining significantly more affordable than larger AI models. Anthropic designed Sonnet 5 to close much of the performance gap between previous Sonnet releases and the company's Opus models, offering major improvements in coding, knowledge work, reasoning, and long-running autonomous tasks. The model demonstrates stronger performance across numerous benchmark evaluations while also improving safety through lower hallucination rates, reduced sycophancy, improved refusal of malicious requests, and greater resilience against prompt injection attacks. Anthropic notes that Sonnet 5 also has substantially lower cybersecurity capabilities than its most advanced Opus models, reducing certain categories of misuse risk while still supporting legitimate development work. Developers can access Sonnet 5 through every Claude subscription tier, Claude Code, and the Claude API using introductory token pricing before standard pricing takes effect. The API allows organizations to integrate Sonnet 5 into production software while selecting different effort levels to optimize cost, latency, and capability for individual workloads. Anthropic also increased platform rate limits to support the higher token usage associated with advanced agentic workflows. Safety safeguards for cybersecurity-related requests are enabled by default, reflecting the model's improved autonomous capabilities while maintaining appropriate protections.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is a new Google Gemini model designed for efficient, high-quality AI agents and production workloads. It builds on Gemini 3.5 Flash with improvements in coding, knowledge work, multimodal understanding, computer use, and complex workflow execution. Google positions Gemini 3.6 Flash as the workhorse model in the Flash series, optimized for the balance of quality, speed, reliability, and cost. The model is designed to reduce verbosity, use fewer output tokens, take fewer reasoning steps, and require fewer tool calls during multi-step tasks. Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash uses 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis Index and can reduce output usage even more on some coding benchmarks. It is priced at $1.50 per 1 million input tokens and $7.50 per 1 million output tokens, giving developers a lower-cost option for agentic workflows than 3.5 Flash. Gemini 3.6 Flash shows gains in benchmarks for software engineering, ML research, computer use, and knowledge work. It can support use cases such as code migration, document parsing, financial data analysis, chart interpretation, report drafting, visual interface building, and multi-agent orchestration. Built-in computer use is available through the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise, helping agents interact with digital tools more reliably. Google also says the model ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards for CBRN and cyber offense misuse while minimizing refusals for beneficial use cases. By combining lower cost, stronger task performance, multimodal understanding, built-in computer use, and safety improvements, Gemini 3.6 Flash is built for teams that need scalable AI agents across software, enterprise, and productivity workflows.

Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI’s most advanced model, designed for high-end reasoning, software engineering, multimodal understanding, knowledge work, and agentic AI applications. The model has 2.8 trillion parameters and is built on Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention mechanism created for long-context performance. It also uses Attention Residuals and supports a native context window of up to 1 million tokens. This makes Kimi K3 suitable for tasks involving large codebases, long research materials, enterprise documentation, multi-file analysis, legal documents, technical manuals, and complex workflows. Kimi K3 always has thinking mode enabled, with reasoning effort configured through the reasoning_effort field and maximum effort currently supported as the default. Developers can use the model through an OpenAI-compatible API, making it easier to integrate with existing SDKs, clients, and application infrastructure. The model supports streaming responses with separate reasoning and final-answer deltas, allowing applications to display reasoning progress and final content differently. Kimi K3 also supports strict structured output with JSON Schema, partial mode for continuing from a prefix, custom tool calling, required tool use, and dynamic tool loading through system messages. Its vision capabilities support image and video inputs through base64 or uploaded files, enabling analysis of visual content alongside text. Automatic context caching helps workflows that reuse long prefixes, such as large knowledge bases or persistent system context, without requiring developers to manage cache IDs manually. By combining frontier-scale parameters, long-context processing, visual input, structured outputs, tool orchestration, and developer-friendly API compatibility, Kimi K3 gives teams a strong foundation for advanced AI agents, coding assistants, research systems, enterprise automation, and multimodal applications.

GLM-5.3 is Z.ai’s frontier coding model built to improve complex software engineering, long-horizon agent work, and advanced technical reasoning through scaled post-training. The model uses the same base model as GLM-5.2, with performance gains coming from additional post-training environments, more diverse tasks, and expanded compute on the existing training stack. Z.ai’s stack includes IndexShare for efficient long-context processing, SAO for reinforcement learning on long-horizon tasks, and slime for large-scale asynchronous post-training. GLM-5.3 is designed to perform better on work that resembles real engineering tasks rather than short coding exercises. Its training environments include production-style workflows where the model must diagnose bottlenecks, inspect documentation, use codebases, run experiments, implement changes, and produce measurable improvements. The model improves coding performance across public and private benchmarks, including Terminal Bench 3.0, DeepSWE, Agents’ Last Exam, and Z.ai Code Bench. GLM-5.3 also improves token efficiency, producing stronger agentic coding results than GLM-5.2 while using fewer output tokens in Z.ai’s internal evaluations. The model supports three reasoning effort levels, low, high, and max, and no longer supports disabling thinking. Z.ai recommends max reasoning effort for coding tasks, while applications using disabled thinking must migrate to enabled thinking before switching to GLM-5.3. The release also reports emergent cyber capabilities, including stronger vulnerability discovery and exploitation-chain reasoning, with open-weight release planned after safety evaluation and hardening. By combining scaled post-training, long-context infrastructure, long-horizon reinforcement learning, coding-agent workflows, benchmark improvements, reasoning controls, and ZCode integration, GLM-5.3 helps developers and researchers work on demanding coding and agentic tasks.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google’s next-generation frontier AI model engineered to combine advanced reasoning, multimodal intelligence, agentic automation, and high-speed performance for developers, enterprises, and everyday users. As the first publicly released model in the Gemini 3.5 family, the platform is designed to execute complex long-horizon workflows while delivering fast response speeds and strong performance across coding, reasoning, multimodal understanding, and AI-driven automation tasks. Gemini 3.5 Flash significantly advances Google’s agentic AI capabilities by enabling AI systems to plan, execute, iterate, and manage multi-step workflows such as software engineering, codebase maintenance, financial analysis, application development, infrastructure operations, and large-scale enterprise automation. Powered by the updated Antigravity harness, the model can coordinate collaborative subagents that work together to complete demanding workflows under supervision while maintaining high reliability and operational efficiency. Gemini 3.5 Flash also demonstrates advanced multimodal capabilities by generating dynamic graphics, interactive web interfaces, animations, and visually rich experiences that support developers and businesses building AI-powered applications and user experiences. The model achieves frontier-level performance across multiple coding, agentic, and multimodal benchmarks while operating at significantly faster output speeds compared to many competing frontier AI systems, helping reduce workflow latency and operational costs. Google has integrated Gemini 3.5 Flash across a broad ecosystem that includes the Gemini app, AI Mode in Google Search, Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and enterprise AI products to provide global access to advanced AI automation capabilities.

Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model engineered to deliver advanced coding intelligence, reasoning capabilities, autonomous workflows, and enterprise-grade collaboration for developers, technical teams, and organizations building AI-powered systems. As the successor to Claude Opus 4.7, the model introduces improvements across software engineering, agentic execution, practical knowledge work, benchmark performance, and alignment behavior while retaining the same standard pricing structure. Claude Opus 4.8 is specifically optimized for complex coding tasks, large-scale workflow orchestration, long-running automation processes, and advanced reasoning scenarios where reliability, transparency, and contextual judgment are critical. One of the model’s defining advancements is its improved honesty and uncertainty awareness, making it significantly less likely to produce unsupported conclusions or overlook defects in generated code, reasoning chains, and operational outputs. Anthropic’s alignment assessments also report stronger prosocial behavior, lower rates of deceptive or unsafe actions, and improved adherence to user intent compared to earlier Opus releases. The release introduces configurable effort controls that allow users to determine how much computational reasoning the model applies to a task, enabling flexible tradeoffs between speed, token consumption, and response depth depending on workflow complexity. Claude Opus 4.8 also powers new “dynamic workflows” functionality in Claude Code, where the model can coordinate hundreds of parallel AI subagents during a single session to execute large-scale software engineering operations such as repository-wide migrations, testing workflows, and multi-step automation tasks. Anthropic further expanded the platform with lower-cost fast mode processing, enabling the model to operate at significantly higher speeds while remaining more affordable than previous high-performance configurations.

GPT-5.5 represents a new class of AI built to transform how work is done across digital environments. It combines advanced reasoning, tool usage, and task execution capabilities to manage complex, multi-step workflows with minimal human intervention. The model performs strongly in software engineering, data analysis, business operations, and scientific research, where it can plan tasks, gather information, test solutions, and refine outputs iteratively. It supports generating documents, building applications, analyzing large datasets, and navigating software systems as part of a unified workflow. A key capability is its integration with workspace agents—customizable AI agents that can be created once and deployed across teams to automate entire processes. These agents can run continuously, interact with tools like CRM systems, messaging platforms, and document editors, and keep workflows moving without constant supervision. Organizations can define permissions, approval checkpoints, and monitoring to maintain full control over automation. GPT-5.5 also improves collaboration by standardizing workflows and scaling best practices across teams. With enterprise-grade security and governance, it is designed for safe deployment in complex environments. Its ability to persist through ambiguity and long-running tasks makes it highly effective for execution-heavy work. By reducing manual intervention and increasing speed, GPT-5.5 enables teams to focus on higher-value activities and operate at a significantly higher level of productivity.

Muse Spark 1.2 is a coding-focused AI model from Meta designed to support advanced software engineering tasks through Muse Code and the Meta Model API. The model builds on Muse Spark 1.1 with improvements in code generation, complex debugging, codebase understanding, and end-to-end developer workflows. Muse Spark 1.2 powers Muse Code, a terminal coding agent that can plan repository changes, write code, validate outputs, and work across large codebases. Muse Code uses persistent async background agents that stay active throughout a session to reduce redundant information gathering and support difficult multi-step work. The runtime uses a local event log where model calls, tool runs, approvals, and edits are appended, making sessions replay-exact and restart-safe. Muse Spark 1.2 was co-trained with Muse Code so the model can take advantage of its toolset, harness workflows, goals, compaction, and subagent architecture. Meta significantly scaled training compute on coding tasks and expanded training environment diversity to improve the model’s engineering capabilities. The model was also trained on long-horizon coding tasks, including whole-repository generation, large end-to-end projects, auto-research, and extended iterative work. Its training approach uses planning, goal conditioning, context compaction, rejection-sampled harness trajectories, and self-improvement data generated with Muse Spark 1.1. Meta also tested Muse Spark 1.2 on long-running GPU kernel optimization workflows where the model wrote, compiled, profiled, and improved Triton kernels over many tool calls. By combining coding-focused training, agentic runtime integration, persistent subagents, long-horizon reasoning, replay-safe execution, and API availability, Muse Spark 1.2 helps developers and AI agents complete complex software engineering work with less intervention.

Claude Opus 4.7 represents a major step forward in AI model development, focusing on advanced reasoning, coding, and enterprise-level task execution. It improves significantly over Opus 4.6 by delivering stronger performance on complex and high-effort software engineering challenges. The model is particularly effective at managing long-running processes, maintaining consistency, and producing reliable outputs over time. Its enhanced instruction-following capabilities ensure that it interprets prompts more literally and executes tasks with greater precision. Opus 4.7 also features advanced self-checking mechanisms, enabling it to validate its own responses before completion. A major highlight is its improved multimodal support, allowing it to process high-resolution images and extract fine visual details. This capability is especially useful for tasks like analyzing technical screenshots, interpreting diagrams, and supporting computer-based workflows. The model produces high-quality professional outputs, including refined documents, presentations, and UI designs that meet business standards. It also demonstrates strong performance across industries such as finance, legal services, and data analysis. Enhanced memory capabilities allow it to retain important context across sessions, making it more efficient for ongoing projects. Opus 4.7 includes safety and alignment improvements, with systems in place to detect and block potentially harmful or restricted use cases. It introduces new controls for balancing reasoning depth and response speed, giving users flexibility based on task complexity. Widely accessible through APIs and major cloud platforms, Opus 4.7 is designed to support scalable, high-performance AI applications for modern enterprises.

Claude Opus 4.6 is an advanced AI language model developed by Anthropic, designed to handle complex reasoning, coding, and enterprise-level tasks with high accuracy. It introduces major improvements in planning, debugging, and code review, making it highly effective for software development workflows. The model is capable of sustaining long-running, agentic tasks and performing reliably across large and complex codebases. A key feature of Claude Opus 4.6 is its 1 million token context window in beta, enabling it to process vast amounts of information while maintaining coherence. It excels in knowledge work tasks such as financial analysis, research, and document creation. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including coding and reasoning evaluations. Claude Opus 4.6 includes adaptive thinking, allowing it to dynamically adjust how deeply it reasons based on context. Developers can fine-tune performance using configurable effort levels that balance intelligence, speed, and cost. The model also supports context compaction, enabling longer workflows without exceeding limits. Integration with tools like Excel and PowerPoint enhances its usability for everyday business tasks. It maintains a strong safety profile with low rates of misaligned behavior and improved reliability. Overall, Claude Opus 4.6 is a powerful AI solution for advanced technical, analytical, and enterprise applications.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the latest evolution in Anthropic’s Sonnet model family, offering major advancements in coding, reasoning, computer interaction, and knowledge-intensive workflows. Designed as a full upgrade rather than an incremental update, it improves consistency, instruction following, and multi-step task completion across a broad range of professional applications. The model introduces a 1 million token context window in beta, enabling users to analyze entire codebases, long contracts, research archives, or complex planning documents in one cohesive session. Developers with early access reported a strong preference for Sonnet 4.6 over Sonnet 4.5 and even favored it over Opus 4.5 in many real-world coding tasks. Users highlighted its reduced overengineering tendencies, improved follow-through, and lower incidence of hallucinations during extended sessions. A major enhancement is its improved computer-use capability, allowing it to operate traditional software environments by interacting with graphical interfaces much like a human user. On benchmarks such as OSWorld, Sonnet models have shown steady gains in handling browser navigation, spreadsheets, and development tools. The model also demonstrates strategic reasoning improvements in long-horizon simulations, such as Vending-Bench Arena, where it optimizes early investments before pivoting toward profitability. On the Claude Developer Platform, Sonnet 4.6 supports adaptive thinking, extended thinking, and context compaction to maximize usable context length. API enhancements now include automated search filtering, code execution, memory, and advanced tool use capabilities for higher-quality outputs. Pricing remains consistent with Sonnet 4.5, making Opus-level performance more accessible to a broader user base. Available across Claude.ai, Cowork, Claude Code, the API, and major cloud platforms, Sonnet 4.6 becomes the new default model for Free and Pro users.

GLM-5 is Z.ai’s most advanced open-source model to date, purpose-built for complex systems engineering, long-horizon planning, and autonomous agent workflows. Building on the foundation of GLM-4.5, it dramatically scales both total parameters and pre-training data while increasing active parameter efficiency. The integration of DeepSeek Sparse Attention allows GLM-5 to maintain strong long-context reasoning capabilities while reducing deployment costs. To improve post-training performance, Z.ai developed slime, an asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that significantly boosts training throughput and iteration speed. As a result, GLM-5 achieves top-tier performance among open-source models across reasoning, coding, and general agent benchmarks. It demonstrates exceptional strength in long-term operational simulations, including leading results on Vending Bench 2, where it manages a year-long simulated business with strong financial outcomes. In coding evaluations such as SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench 2.0, GLM-5 delivers competitive results that narrow the gap with proprietary frontier systems. The model is fully open-sourced under the MIT License and available through Hugging Face, ModelScope, and Z.ai’s developer platforms. Developers can deploy GLM-5 locally using inference frameworks like vLLM and SGLang, including support for non-NVIDIA hardware through optimization and quantization techniques. Through Z.ai, users can access both Chat Mode for fast interactions and Agent Mode for tool-augmented, multi-step task execution. GLM-5 also enables structured document generation, producing ready-to-use .docx, .pdf, and .xlsx files for business and academic workflows. With compatibility across coding agents and cross-application automation frameworks, GLM-5 moves foundation models from conversational assistants toward full-scale work engines.

GLM-5.1 marks the newest evolution in Z.ai’s GLM lineup, designed as a state-of-the-art AI model focused on agents, specifically for tasks involving coding, logical reasoning, and overseeing long-term processes. This version builds on the foundation set by GLM-5, which utilizes a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework to maximize performance while keeping inference costs low, supporting a broader vision of making weight models available to developers. A key feature of GLM-5.1 is its ability to promote agentic behavior, enabling it to plan, execute, and enhance multi-step tasks rather than just responding to single prompts. The model is meticulously crafted to handle complex workflows, such as troubleshooting code, navigating repositories, and conducting sequential tasks, all while preserving context over extended periods. Compared to earlier models, GLM-5.1 provides improved reliability during prolonged interactions, ensuring consistency throughout longer sessions and reducing errors in multi-step reasoning tasks. Furthermore, this advancement represents a significant step forward in the realm of AI, especially in its proficiency for managing intricate task workflows with ease. With its innovative features, GLM-5.1 sets a new standard for what agent-focused AI can achieve in practical applications.

GPT-4.1 nano is a highly efficient, smaller-scale version of the GPT-4.1 model, built for high-speed, low-cost AI applications. It retains the core capabilities of the GPT-4.1 series, including support for a 1 million token context window, but with optimized performance for tasks like classification, search, and autocompletion. Designed to be both affordable and fast, GPT-4.1 nano is perfect for developers and businesses looking for a quick, reliable AI solution that minimizes latency and operational costs.

GPT-5 mini is a faster, more affordable variant of OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5 language model, specifically tailored for well-defined and precise tasks that benefit from high reasoning ability. It accepts both text and image inputs (image input only), and generates high-quality text outputs, supported by a large 400,000-token context window and a maximum of 128,000 tokens in output, enabling complex multi-step reasoning and detailed responses. The model excels in providing rapid response times, making it ideal for use cases where speed and efficiency are critical, such as chatbots, customer service, or real-time analytics. GPT-5 mini’s pricing structure significantly reduces costs, with input tokens priced at $0.25 per million and output tokens at $2 per million, offering a more economical option compared to the flagship GPT-5. While it supports advanced features like streaming, function calling, structured output generation, and fine-tuning, it does not currently support audio input or image generation capabilities. GPT-5 mini integrates seamlessly with multiple API endpoints including chat completions, responses, embeddings, and batch processing, providing versatility for a wide array of applications. Rate limits are tier-based, scaling from 500 requests per minute up to 30,000 per minute for higher tiers, accommodating small to large scale deployments. The model also supports snapshots to lock in performance and behavior, ensuring consistency across applications. GPT-5 mini is ideal for developers and businesses seeking a cost-effective solution with high reasoning power and fast throughput. It balances cutting-edge AI capabilities with efficiency, making it a practical choice for applications demanding speed, precision, and scalability.

GPT-5 nano is OpenAI’s fastest and most cost-efficient version of the GPT-5 model, engineered to handle high-speed text and image input processing for tasks such as summarization, classification, and content generation. It features an extensive 400,000-token context window and can output up to 128,000 tokens, allowing for complex, multi-step language understanding despite its focus on speed. With ultra-low pricing—$0.05 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens—GPT-5 nano makes advanced AI accessible to budget-conscious users and developers working at scale. The model supports a variety of advanced API features, including streaming output, function calling for interactive applications, structured outputs for precise control, and fine-tuning for customization. While it lacks support for audio input and web search, GPT-5 nano supports image input, code interpretation, and file search, broadening its utility. Developers benefit from tiered rate limits that scale from 500 to 30,000 requests per minute and up to 180 million tokens per minute, supporting everything from small projects to enterprise workloads. The model also offers snapshots to lock performance and behavior, ensuring consistent results over time. GPT-5 nano strikes a practical balance between speed, cost, and capability, making it ideal for fast, efficient AI implementations where rapid turnaround and budget are critical. It fits well for applications requiring real-time summarization, classification, chatbots, or lightweight natural language processing tasks. Overall, GPT-5 nano expands the accessibility of OpenAI’s powerful AI technology to a broader user base.

GLM-4.6 builds on the groundwork established by its predecessor, offering improved reasoning, coding, and agent functionalities that lead to significant improvements in inferential precision, better tool application during reasoning exercises, and a smoother incorporation into agent architectures. In extensive benchmark assessments evaluating reasoning, coding, and agent performance, GLM-4.6 outperforms GLM-4.5 and holds its own against competitive models such as DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp and Claude Sonnet 4, though it still trails Claude Sonnet 4.5 regarding coding proficiency. Additionally, when evaluated through practical testing using a comprehensive “CC-Bench” suite, which encompasses tasks related to front-end development, tool creation, data analysis, and algorithmic challenges, GLM-4.6 shows superior performance compared to GLM-4.5, achieving a nearly equal standing with Claude Sonnet 4, winning around 48.6% of direct matchups while exhibiting an approximate 15% boost in token efficiency. This newest iteration is available via the Z.ai API, allowing developers to utilize it either as a backend for an LLM or as the fundamental component in an agent within the platform's API ecosystem. Moreover, the enhancements in GLM-4.6 promise to significantly elevate productivity across diverse application areas, making it a compelling choice for developers eager to adopt the latest advancements in AI technology. Consequently, the model's versatility and performance improvements position it as a key player in the ongoing evolution of AI-driven solutions.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is part of the Qwen3.5 "Medium" model lineup, designed as an efficient multimodal foundation model that effectively balances strong reasoning skills with real-world application demands. It features a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, comprising 35 billion parameters but activating approximately 3 billion for each token, which allows it to deliver performance comparable to much larger models while significantly reducing computational costs. The model incorporates a hybrid attention mechanism that fuses linear attention with conventional attention layers, enhancing its capability to manage extensive context and improving scalability for complex tasks. As a vision-language model, it adeptly processes both text and visual inputs, catering to a wide range of applications such as multimodal reasoning, programming, and automated workflows. Additionally, it is designed to function as a flexible "AI agent," skilled in planning, tool utilization, and systematic problem-solving, thereby expanding its utility beyond simple conversational exchanges. This versatility not only enhances its performance in various tasks but also makes it an invaluable resource in fields that increasingly rely on sophisticated AI-driven solutions. Its adaptability and efficiency position it as a key player in the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence applications.