Domain-by-domain evaluation of which foundation models hold the state of the art in September 2026.
Reasoning & STEM Intelligence
Models with adaptive test-time compute, deep chain-of-thought, and autonomous multi-turn reasoning.
DOMAIN SOTAClaude Fable 5.1 / OpenAI Astra / Grok 4.6
#1Claude Fable 5.1(Anthropic)
1,000,000$10/M
#2GPT-5.6 Sol(OpenAI)
1,050,000$3/M
#3OpenAI Astra(OpenAI)
1,050,000$15/M
#4Grok 4.6(xAI)
500,000$2/M
Agentic Software Engineering & Coding
Frontier performance on long-horizon code refactoring, Terminal-Bench execution, and tool orchestration.
DOMAIN SOTAClaude Fable 5.1 (Terminal-Bench 52.6% SOTA) / Gemini 3.7 Flash
#1Claude Fable 5.1(Anthropic)
1,000,000$10/M
#2Grok 4.6(xAI)
500,000$2/M
#3North Mini Code(Cohere)
256,000Free
Open Weights & Self-Hosting
Publicly downloadable weights under open and community licenses for enterprise sovereignty and private clusters.
DOMAIN SOTAQwen3.8 2.4T A95B (2.4T MoE) / Llama 4 Maverick (128E MoE)
#1Llama 4 Maverick (128E)(Meta AI)
1,048,576$0.45/M
#2Muse Voice Transcribe(Meta AI)
128,000$0.1/M
#3Llama 4 Scout (16E)(Meta AI)
1,310,720$0.2/M
#4DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp(DeepSeek)
262,144$0.12/M
#5Qwen3.8 2.4T A95B(Alibaba Cloud (Qwen))
1,000,000$1.8/M
Context Window Capacity
Maximum tokens accommodated in a single inference session without losing retrieval precision or needle recall.
DOMAIN SOTALlama 4 Scout (1.31M) / OpenAI Astra (1.05M) / Gemini 3.7 (1.048M)
#1Llama 4 Scout (16E)(Meta AI)
1,310,720$0.2/M
#2GPT-5.6 Sol(OpenAI)
1,050,000$3/M
#3OpenAI Astra(OpenAI)
1,050,000$15/M
#4Llama 4 Maverick (128E)(Meta AI)
1,048,576$0.45/M
#5Gemini 3.8 Flash(Google DeepMind)
1,048,576$0.75/M
Inference Cost & Value
Lowest input/output pricing per 1M tokens combined with near-frontier intelligence for production applications.
DOMAIN SOTANorth Mini Code (Free) / Muse Voice ($0.10/M) / Qwen3.8 Flash ($0.15/M)
#1North Mini Code(Cohere)
256,000Free
#2Muse Voice Transcribe(Meta AI)
128,000$0.1/M
#3DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp(DeepSeek)
262,144$0.12/M
#4Qwen3.8 Flash(Alibaba Cloud (Qwen))
1,000,000$0.15/M
#5GPT-5.6 Luna(OpenAI)
256,000$0.2/M