TierMarks

The Top 10 AI & LLMs

Our critic's ranking, best first.

  1. Claude Fable 5.1The point release that mattered more than most whole numbers, and the first model that reliably says it is unsure instead of guessing well.Read the review
  2. GPT-5.6 SolGPT-5.6 SolOpenAI's July flagship is the model to beat on agentic coding, and the one you supervise least
  3. Claude Opus 5.5Fable-level work at a lower Opus price, and on agentic coding the new number to beat.
  4. ChatGPT Sol 5.6The best coding model anyone sells, and it gets there on roughly half the tokens and a third less money.
  5. Claude Sonnet 5.5Opus-class agentic coding at half the Opus price, and on Terminal-Bench the best score Anthropic has published.
  6. CursorA fork of the editor rather than a plugin for it, which is why it can do things a plugin cannot.
  7. Claude Haiku 5.5A small model that outworks last year's big ones on agent tasks, at ten cents per million tokens in.
  8. GPT-6.1 SolClose to GPT-6 Astra on agentic work for a fraction of its cost, a week after the Sol it replaced.
  9. Claude Haiku 4.5The small model that stopped being the one you settle for, and the right default for anything you run a thousand times.
  10. GitHub CopilotThe autocomplete that started the whole category, still the one that fits most naturally into a working day.