Release Timeline

Released Oct 14, 2026; xAI's speech-to-speech 3.0 ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index (86.9) with sub-second latency, at $0.08/min ($4.80/hr) - same price as Voice 2.0, now default via grok-voice-latest.

Released Oct 12, 2026; Meta's first frontier model with Active Memory and Active Focus for personal and professional agents, frontier coding and computer use at $4/$20 per 1M tokens.

Released Oct 7, 2026; fastest Claude to date at $0.10/$0.50 per 1M tokens for prompts up to 100K, scoring 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0.

Released Oct 6, 2026 in public preview on Mistral Studio ($1.36/$4.18); Mistral's largest model - 1.05T total / 49B active MoE with 1.6B vision encoder, native multimodal, 1M context, 160+ languages; SOTA open-weight outside China for cyber, finance and legal with 61.7% DeepSWE v1.1; weights drop Oct 27.

Announced Sept 30, 2026; Gemini 4 Argon is Google DeepMind's frontier model for long-horizon software engineering, enterprise knowledge work, and cyber defense, with 1M output tokens and an introductory price of $2/$10 per 1M tokens.

Released Sept 29, 2026; upgrade to GPT-6 Sol with near-Astra coding and computer use at one-fifth of Astra's price ($2/$10).

Released Sept 28, 2026; 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 versus 10.3% for Sonnet 5, running 30%+ faster at the same $2/$10 pricing.

Released Sept 22, 2026; Anthropic's flagship with Fable-level agentic coding at 40% lower cost than Opus 5 ($4/$20), beating GPT-6 Astra on FrontierCode at a fifth of the cost per task.

Released Sept 22, 2026; high-volume tier at $0.10/$0.50 - half the 5.6 Luna price - matching GPT-5.6 Sol on factuality at ~1% of the cost.

Released Sept 22, 2026; Xiaomi's flagship reasoning model scaled with 6-day Live RL (750K trajectories), scoring 46 on AA Index as strongest open model with 72.6% DeepSWE v1.1 at unchanged V2.5 pricing.

Released Sept 22, 2026; full-modality low-cost reasoning model outperforming MiMo-V2.5 Pro, with 65.7% DeepSWE v1.1 at $0.14/$0.28 and open weights.

Released Sept 21, 2026; xAI's flagship for coding and knowledge work on a larger base with longer RL, matching Grok 4.6 price/speed ($2/$6) with 46.3% CursorBench 4.0 and 71.0% DeepSWE v1.1.

Released Sept 18, 2026; xAI's speech-to-text 2.0 ranked first for accuracy among 32 streaming models on Artificial Analysis, at $0.10/hr batch and $0.20/hr streaming.

Released Sept 18, 2026; Qwen's first omni model built for agentic work with text/image/audio/video input, 1M context and 131K output at $0.15/$0.47, video input ~89% cheaper than Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus.

Released Sept 15, 2026; Google's native speech-to-speech model that reasons and talks at once, with background tools, 97-language switching, and #1 82.6 on the Speech-to-Speech Quality Index.

Released Sept 15, 2026; TypeSafe's first System One model returns typed decisions with calibrated confidence in 70-500ms, at $0.042 per 1M input tokens with free output.

Released Sept 10, 2026; first of DeepSeek's Causal Encoder-Decoder family with native image+text, 1M context and 384K output. Replaces V4-Flash and V4-Pro from Sept 14.

Launched Sept 8, 2026; OpenAI's image model with sharper detail, precision editing and 50% lower latency. API twins Flare (default) and Sunburst (precision).

Rolled out Sept 4, 2026; OpenAI's most capable model for autonomous agentic workflows and software engineering. Hit 97.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4 and met the 'Critical' cybersecurity threshold.

Released Sept 3, 2026; Meta's ultra-cheap ($0.05/M in, $0.15/M out) real-time multimodal model with native simultaneous voice, vision, and ultra-low latency response under 80ms.

Released Sept 2, 2026; Google DeepMind's frontier workhorse for agentic coding loops, recursive self-correction, and 1M token real-time multimodal streaming.

Released Sept 1, 2026; Anthropic's capability ceiling for agentic coding and knowledge work, with 75% cheaper cache reads and 52.6% on Terminal-Bench-Science.

Announced Sept 1, 2026; Meta's streaming speech-to-text model with diarization and endpointing, trained on 70+ languages (25 validated), billed at $3.00 per 1,000 audio minutes ($0.18/hr).

Open-sourced under MIT license on August 30, 2026. 305B parameter multimodal vision-language model with native document understanding.

Current #1 on OpenRouter by weekly tokens with +639% growth; preview of Tencent's next-generation reasoning model for agentic workflows.

Released August 26, 2026; open-weight multimodal MoE (125B + 51B N-gram, 6B active) with 1M context and 131K output at $0.16/$0.47.

Top-5 OpenRouter volume driver; ultra-cheap large-context model for high-volume extraction, long documents, and agent fleets.

Z.ai's primary flagship; high-throughput foundation model with strong coding share and large-document handling at scale.

DeepSeek's primary 1.6T parameter powerhouse with 49B activated per token, configurable thinking budget, and 1M context.

The traffic-leading Gemini on OpenRouter (7.9T/30d); best fast default for images, audio, video, and files.

Released August 12, 2026; xAI's smartest model with frontier performance in coding and autonomous agents, integrated natively into Cursor and Grok Build.

The largest open-weight MoE model in existence. 2.4 Trillion parameters with 95B activated per token and 1M context, available on HuggingFace and ModelScope.

The recommended default for coding, writing, and production agents; top tool-call reliability for structured workflows.

OpenAI's unified ChatGPT 5.6 family - Sol (reasoning), Terra (balanced), Luna (speed) - on one 1.05M-context foundation with multi-agent orchestration.

Deep-reasoning coding variant at 79.2% SWE-Verified; for hard architecture, debugging, and multi-file refactors.

Largest trailing-30-day total on OpenRouter (49.9T tokens); the default cost-first agent model at $0.09/M input with 1M context.

Deep multi-hour research, complex code synthesis, and long-horizon workflow orchestration.

Top-12 OpenRouter volume; agent-swarm orchestration pick with ~90% cache hits making effective cost far lower than sticker price.

Leads OpenRouter programming share at 19.1%; repository-level code understanding with 1.1M context at $0.14/M input.

Tencent's stable production flagship; 295B MoE with configurable no-think/low/high reasoning, grounded anti-hallucination behavior, and sustained 30T+ monthly OpenRouter volume.

Prior-generation workhorse with a durable coding niche and 14T+ trailing-30-day OpenRouter volume.

550B open model with a generous free tier; top-10 OpenRouter volume for high-throughput open inference and experimentation.

Top-5 OpenRouter volume; the default for OpenClaw-style autonomous agents, balancing reasoning depth with batch throughput.

Extended-context open-weights model capable of ingesting 1.31 million tokens in a single prompt for codebase-wide document analysis.

Dense 128B multimodal instruction-following model with native text and image understanding, tuned for European enterprise compliance.

Prior Flash checkpoint with durable 22T+ monthly volume; identical budget pricing for pinned production deployments.

Meta's trillion-parameter open foundation model. 128-expert MoE architecture with 1M token context, powering enterprise on-premise deployments and community fine-tuning.

Released Mar 6, 2026; India's sovereign 105B MoE trained from scratch on 12T tokens, SOTA across 22 Indian languages with 98.6 Math500 and 49.5 BrowseComp.

Kuaishou's Feb 2026 video flagship: native multilingual audio, motion brush and best-in-class image-to-video at ~$0.84 per 10s clip.

Launched Dec 2025 with 1,247 Elo - No. 1 in text-to-video: director camera moves and reference characters at ~$1.49 per 10s clip.

Google's reasoning-first image model: native 4K output, 14 reference images, 10 aspect ratios and SynthID watermarking; about $0.134 per 1K/2K image.

Google's video model with native dialogue and sound effects, 4K detail and scene extension; $0.40/s at 1080p with audio.