Guide · updated live
The best LLM in 2026
Our pick
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1
Anthropic
Claude Fable 5.1 improves on Claude Fable 5 across the board, with the biggest gains in agentic coding, long-running agentic workflows, and knowledge work: long code refactors, front-end and visual...
Top 5 right now
- Elo 1638
- Elo 1619
- Elo 1628
- Elo 1608
- Elo 1603
The full leaderboard tracks 20+ frontier models. For task-specific picks, see coding, reasoning, and agentic.
How to pick for your task
- Building an agent? Terminal-Bench and SWE-bench are the signals to trust — see /agentic.
- Writing code? SWE-bench Verified + Aider Polyglot — see /coding.
- Reasoning-heavy work? GPQA Diamond + ARC-AGI-2 — see /reasoning.
- High-volume classification? Optimize for cost — see /cheapest.
- Whole-codebase or long docs? Prioritize context — see /long-context.
FAQ
- What is the best LLM right now?
- The single best LLM depends on the task. For overall SOTA reasoning, the top of our leaderboard changes weekly — see the current pick above. For coding specifically, see /coding; for long context, /long-context; for cheapest, /cheapest.
- How is 'best' decided?
- We aggregate LMArena Elo, Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, LiveBench, GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench Verified, Terminal-Bench, ARC-AGI-2 and Aider Polyglot. No single benchmark decides — the model that leads across the most signals is called SOTA.
- Is the best LLM always the most expensive?
- Usually yes on output price — flagship reasoning models are the most expensive per token. But for many tasks, a cheaper model at 90% of the quality is a better business choice. Check /cheapest for the price-optimized picks.