Who is winning the AI race?
GPT-6 Astra (OpenAI) holds the Sep 2026 crown with a score of 88.22/100. Anthropic leads the cumulative provider race at 83.4. The timeline covers 18 months of releases, Apr 2025 to Sep 2026.
Scrub the timeline to travel through 18 months of model releases. See who held the crown, who climbed the ranks, and how the benchmark landscape evolved.
Monthly race snapshot
Export or embed the live race view for the currently selected month.
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Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic
Releases this month
45 modelsProvider Race
Cumulative avg. top-3 score through Sep 2026Benchmark Health
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How fresh are the benchmarks we use to score models? Green means the benchmark is actively separating models. Red means scores are bunching up or the benchmark is outdated.
Agentic
94 benchmarksCoding
65 benchmarksReasoning
30 benchmarksMultimodal
69 benchmarksKnowledge
57 benchmarksMultilingual
15 benchmarksInstruction Following
4 benchmarksMath
34 benchmarksQuestions
Who is winning the AI race right now?
GPT-6 Astra (OpenAI) holds the Sep 2026 crown with a score of 88.22/100. Anthropic leads the cumulative provider race at 83.4. The timeline covers 18 months of releases, Apr 2025 to Sep 2026.
How does BenchLM decide who holds the crown each month?
Each month groups the models released in that month by confirmed release date. The crown goes to the highest-scoring ranking-eligible release of the month on BenchLM’s overall index, which weights sourced benchmark evidence across coding, agentic, reasoning, knowledge, math, multimodal, instruction-following, and multilingual categories. Unranked releases are shown as tracked but cannot take the crown.
How is the provider race calculated?
The provider race is cumulative: for each provider it averages the top three scores among all ranked models released up to and including the selected month. Position changes compare that ordering with the previous month.
How often is the AI race timeline updated?
The timeline is rebuilt from BenchLM’s model catalog on every site build. Benchmark data was last verified on September 29, 2026; the newest month shown is Sep 2026.
Want deeper historical analysis?
Explore 21 months of Arena Elo ratings — crown changes, provider dominance, open-source gap tracking, and more.
LLM Leaderboard History