Agents & tool use Models

OpenAI's second-generation reasoning model, announced in December 2024 and released in April 2025, which posted large gains over o1 on science, software-engineering and competitive-programming benchmarks before being succeeded by GPT-5.

Kimi K2 is an open-weight mixture-of-experts language model from Moonshot AI, released in July 2025 with 1 trillion total parameters, 32 billion active per token and a 128K-token context.

Gemini 3 Pro is the first model of Google's Gemini 3 generation, released in preview in November 2025 with a 1-million-token context window and top-ranked results on arena leaderboards and reasoning, coding and multimodal benchmarks.

Claude Mythos Preview, announced on 7 April 2026, is an unreleased frontier model that Anthropic made available only to restricted partners through Project Glasswing, a programme for securing critical software.

DeepSeek-V4, released in preview on 24 April 2026, comprises V4-Pro and V4-Flash, two open mixture-of-experts models with a 1M-token context. Its architecture targets long-context efficiency, and its later releases extended the series with agent upgrades and multimodal input.

Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic's Mythos-class model for general use, released on 9 June 2026. Its sibling Claude Mythos 5 is the same model with some safeguards lifted for vetted users.

Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight multimodal model from Moonshot AI, released on 16 July 2026 with weights following on 27 July under the Kimi K3 License.

K2 Horizon is a family of six open language models from the Institute of Foundation Models, released in September 2026 with weights, code, training data and recipes under the Apache 2.0 licence.

GPT-6 is OpenAI's sixth-generation model family, launched from 3 September 2026 with GPT-6 Astra, followed by Sol, Luna and Instant. Astra was the first OpenAI model to reach its internal critical cybersecurity threshold.

Gemini 4 Argon is the first model in Google's Gemini 4 family, announced on 30 September 2026 and made generally available on 13 October 2026, built for long multi-step work and shipped with a one-million-token output limit.

Jais-3-375B-A23B is an open-weight Arabic-focused mixture-of-experts model from the Institute of Foundation Models: 375 billion parameters stored, 23 billion active per token, a 512,000-token context window and Apache 2.0 weights.

OpenAI Five was a team of five reinforcement-learning bots that played the video game Dota 2; in April 2019 it beat OG, the reigning world champions, in a best-of-three series.

Fuyu-8B is a decoder-only multimodal model that Adept open-sourced in October 2023; it drops the image encoder, accepts arbitrary resolutions, and reads screens and charts.

Claude 2.1, released on 21 November 2023, doubled the context window to 200,000 tokens and cut false statements by half compared with Claude 2.0. It added tool use and system prompts.

Cohere's 104-billion-parameter language model, announced in April 2024, is tuned for retrieval-augmented generation and multi-step tool use in business settings; it launched first on Microsoft Azure and was also released as open weights.

The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, announced on 22 October 2024, raised coding and agentic scores and introduced computer use in public beta, the first such offer from a frontier AI model.

Gemini 2.0 Flash is the first model of Google's Gemini 2.0 generation, released as an experimental model in December 2024 with multimodal output and native tool calling, and made generally available in February 2025.

Grok 3 and the cheaper Grok 3 mini are xAI's reasoning models from February 2025. Grok 3 added a Think mode, a 1-million-token context window and the DeepSearch research agent.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet, released on 24 February 2025, was described by Anthropic as the first hybrid reasoning model on the market, able to answer quickly or think step by step at length. It launched with Claude Code.

Command A is Cohere's 111-billion-parameter model, released in March 2025 with a 256k-token context window. Cohere said it runs on two GPUs and delivers 150% higher throughput than Command R+ 08-2024.

ERNIE X1 is Baidu's deep-thinking reasoning model released on 16 March 2025 alongside ERNIE 4.5, notable for tool use, multimodal input and low pricing, and later followed by X1 Turbo and X1.1.

AlphaEvolve is a Google DeepMind coding agent announced on 14 May 2025 that pairs Gemini models with automated evaluators to evolve algorithms, yielding a Borg scheduling heuristic, faster kernels and new mathematical results.

Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, announced on 22 May 2025, were hybrid models with extended thinking. Anthropic called Opus 4 the best coding model in the world, and Claude Code became generally available the same day.

GLM-4.5 is Zhipu's open-weight language model, released in July 2025 with 355 billion total parameters and a lighter sibling, GLM-4.5-Air. Both are hybrid reasoning models released under the MIT License.

Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy are xAI's models from July 2025. Grok 4 has a 256,000-token context and was trained with reinforcement learning at pretraining scale, while Heavy runs parallel test-time compute.

Qwen3-Coder is an open-weight family of coding models from the Qwen team; its flagship 480B-parameter model, announced in July 2025, was built and trained specifically for agentic coding tasks.

Genie 3 is Google DeepMind's general-purpose world model, announced on 5 August 2025. It turns text prompts into interactive 720p environments that can be navigated in real time at 24 frames per second, and was released as a limited research preview.

DeepSeek-V3.1, released on 21 August 2025 under the MIT License, was DeepSeek's first hybrid model, supporting both a thinking mode and a non-thinking mode in one set of weights. It has 671 billion total parameters, with 37 billion activated per token.

Qwen3-VL is Alibaba's open vision-language model family, released in September 2025 under Apache 2.0. Its 235B flagship handles long video, GUI operation and 2D and 3D grounding.

Claude Sonnet 4.5, released on 29 September 2025, was a drop-in replacement for Sonnet 4 at the same price. Anthropic reported that it could stay focused on complex tasks for more than 30 hours.

MiniMax-M2 is an open-weights mixture-of-experts language model released by MiniMax in October 2025, with 230B total and 10B active parameters, aimed at coding and agentic workflows.

Kimi K2 Thinking is a reasoning model released by Moonshot AI in November 2025, built on the Kimi K2 mixture-of-experts architecture and trained for native INT4 inference and long chains of tool calls.

Claude Opus 4.5, released on 24 November 2025, cost a third as much as Opus 4.1 per token and introduced an effort parameter that lets developers trade capability for time and cost. Claude Opus 4.6 succeeded it.

GLM-4.7 is Zhipu's open-weights language model released in December 2025, aimed at multilingual agentic coding and terminal tasks. It reports clear gains over GLM-4.6 on software-engineering benchmarks and ships under the MIT license.

DeepSeek-V3.2, released on 1 December 2025, succeeded the experimental V3.2-Exp and integrated thinking into tool use. Its companion V3.2-Speciale, which maximizes reasoning, reached gold-level results at several 2025 competitions.

Kimi K2.5 is a natively multimodal open-weight model from Moonshot AI, released on 27 January 2026. It has 1 trillion total parameters, a 256K-token context and an Agent Swarm feature for parallel sub-agents.

Step 3.5 Flash is an open-weights Mixture-of-Experts language model from StepFun, released in February 2026 with 196 billion total parameters, a 256K-token context and an Apache 2.0 license.

GPT-5.3-Codex is a coding model OpenAI released on 5 February 2026, which the company called its first model that was instrumental in creating itself and pitched for repository search, terminal commands and debugging as well as writing code.

Released on 5 February 2026, Claude Opus 4.6 was an upgrade to Anthropic's smartest model. It was the first Opus-class model with a 1M-token context window, in beta at launch, and it introduced agent teams in Claude Code.

MiniMax-M2.5 is an open-weight 229B-parameter language model released in February 2026 for agentic coding and office work, shipped alongside a faster Lightning variant and reported at the top of software-engineering benchmarks.

GLM-5 is Zhipu's open model released on 12 February 2026 under the MIT License, with 744 billion parameters and 40 billion active. It was built for agentic engineering.

Seed2.0 is ByteDance's February 2026 Doubao model series, offered in three agent-oriented sizes with low token pricing and reported benchmark results.

Qwen3.5 is a natively multimodal model family from Alibaba released in February 2026. Its open flagship, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, has 397B total parameters and 17B active per token, under Apache 2.0.

Released on 17 February 2026 with a 1M-token context window in beta, Claude Sonnet 4.6 kept the price of Sonnet 4.5 and became the default model for Free and Pro users on claude.ai.

GPT-5.4 is a model OpenAI released on 5 March 2026 in Thinking and Pro versions. It added built-in computer use and improved deep research, and it was the model that succeeded GPT-5.2.

A generation of Alibaba's Qwen models released in April 2026, spanning proprietary Plus and Max versions aimed at agentic coding and open-weight models such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a 35B-parameter mixture-of-experts with 3B active parameters.

GLM-5.1 is Zhipu AI's open-source large language model released in April 2026, built for coding and long-running agent tasks and notable for topping SWE-Bench Pro ahead of competing frontier models in Zhipu's own comparison.

Muse Spark is the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, released on 8 April 2026 as a closed model that powers the Meta AI app and meta.ai. An open-weight sibling followed later.

Released on 16 April 2026 at the same price as Opus 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7 added an xhigh effort level and accepted much larger images. It was the first model to test automatic blocking of high-risk cybersecurity requests.

Laguna XS.2 is Poolside's first open-weight coding model: 33 billion total parameters with 3 billion active per token, released under Apache 2.0 and trained on 30 trillion tokens.

Laguna M.1 is Poolside's 225-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model for long-horizon agentic coding, activating 23 billion parameters per token. Its weights reached Hugging Face seven weeks after launch.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google's first Gemini 3.5 model, announced on 19 May 2026 and built for agentic and coding work; it became the default model in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search.

A mixture-of-experts language model released by MiniMax in June 2026, with about 428B total parameters, a 1M-token context window and a new sparse attention scheme built for long-context and agent-style work. [^1]

Zhipu's open-weight language model released in June 2026 under the MIT License, with a 1M-token context, a shared sparse-attention indexer, and higher reasoning and coding scores than GLM-5.1.

ByteDance Seed's Seed2.1, released in June 2026 in Pro and Turbo versions, is a Doubao-family model aimed at real productivity work, with reported gains in agent ability, coding, knowledge, reasoning and multimodal understanding.

Claude Sonnet 5, released on 30 June 2026, is Anthropic's most agentic Sonnet model. It can make plans, use browsers and terminals, and run autonomously, at an introductory price of $2 and $10 per million tokens.

Tencent Hy3 is an open-weight reasoning model released on 6 July 2026 under Apache 2.0, with 295 billion total parameters, 21 billion active and a 256K context.

OpenAI's three-model family released on 9 July 2026 — Luna, Terra and Sol, ordered from least to most capable — with Sol pitched as the company's strongest coding and agent model.

Claude Opus 5, released on 24 July 2026 at $5 and $25 per million tokens, is Anthropic's most aligned model to date and its most capable generally available model for scientific research.

GLM-5.3 is Zhipu's open-weight language model released on 14 August 2026. It keeps the GLM-5.2 base model and gains its improvements from post-training, with reported state-of-the-art open results on agentic coding and cybersecurity benchmarks.

Tencent Hy4 preview is an open-weight mixture-of-experts model released on 28 August 2026 with 770 billion total parameters, 49 billion active and a context of over one million tokens.

Step 5 Preview is a preview release of StepFun's flagship foundation model: a sparse mixture-of-experts system with 600 billion total parameters, a 1-million-token context window and published weights, released in September 2026.

Claude Fable 5.1, released on 1 September 2026, keeps the $10 and $50 per million token price of Fable 5, with cache reads 75% cheaper. Its sibling Claude Mythos 5.1 is limited to trusted-access programmes.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, released on 10 September 2026 under the API name deepseek-flash, is a 552-billion-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts model with a causal encoder-decoder design and a 1M-token context.

Claude Opus 5.5, released on 22 September 2026, is the first model in Anthropic's Claude 5.5 family. Anthropic said it performs at the level of Fable 5.1 on most work, at about 40% lower cost than Opus 5.

Claude Sonnet 5.5, released on 28 September 2026, is the second model in the Claude 5.5 family and Anthropic's fastest Sonnet to date. It costs $2 and $10 per million tokens, with cache reads halved in October 2026.

OpenAI's late-2026 model family: Sol, released at DevDay on 29 September 2026, and the faster, cheaper Terra on 26 October 2026. A planned Astra version was withheld over safety concerns.

Kimi K3.1 Pro is Moonshot AI's October 2026 open-weights model, the first in the K3.1 series, built for financial research, 3D modeling and coding. It keeps K3's mixture-of-experts scale but swaps in sparse attention layers.

Claude Haiku 5.5, released on 7 October 2026, is the third model in the Claude 5.5 family. Anthropic called it the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model it had released, at about 75% less cost to run on average.

Muse Spark Open is Meta's open-weight large language model, announced on 15 October 2026. With 816 billion total parameters, it is built for coding and agentic work, and its weights can be downloaded, unlike the closed Muse Spark that started the family.

Jais-3-MoVA-36B-A4B is an Arabic-centric mixture-of-experts model from the Institute of Foundation Models: 36 billion parameters, 4 billion active per token, a 512,000-token context and a mixture-of-values attention scheme.

Jais-3-7B is a dense 7B Arabic-and-English model from the Institute of Foundation Models, with a 512,000-token context window, a single-GPU footprint of about 18 GB, and reasoning returned in a separate field.

iFlytek's Spark X2.6 is a device-cloud model family unveiled in October 2026, pairing a 293-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts cloud model with smaller on-device models and a router that decides where each task runs.

Gato is a generalist agent from DeepMind, announced on 12 May 2022. A single network with one set of weights handles text, images, Atari games and robot control, aiming at multi-task, multi-embodiment learning.

Cohere's 35-billion-parameter language model announced in March 2024, built for retrieval-augmented generation and tool use in production, with a 128k-token context window and weights released for research.

Qwen2-VL is Alibaba's vision-language model released on 29 August 2024. It understands videos longer than 20 minutes, reads text in many languages, and can act as an agent on phones and robots.

Genie 2 is a foundation world model from Google DeepMind, announced on 4 December 2024, that turns a single prompt image into a playable 3D environment that a person or an AI agent can explore with keyboard and mouse controls.

Qwen2.5-VL is Alibaba's vision-language model family released in January 2025 in 3B, 7B, 32B and 72B sizes. It reads charts and documents, localises objects, works as a visual agent and understands videos over an hour long.

UI-TARS is a GUI agent model from ByteDance Seed: it takes only screenshots as input and outputs keyboard and mouse actions, reported state-of-the-art results on more than 10 benchmarks, and was released with open weights under Apache-2.0.

Llama Nemotron is NVIDIA's family of open reasoning models in Nano, Super and Ultra sizes, launched in March 2025 and built on Meta's Llama 3 models.

xLAM-2 is Salesforce's family of large action models, from 1 billion to 70 billion parameters, trained on simulated agent–human data and tuned for multi-turn tool use rather than single-call function calling.

A speech-to-speech foundation model in Amazon's Nova family, announced on 8 April 2025, which handles recognition, understanding and speech generation in a single model rather than a chain of separate ones.

ByteDance Seed's GUI agent model from April 2025 and the successor to UI-TARS. Its 7B version is open-source under Apache-2.0, and the family reports state-of-the-art results on several screen-control benchmarks.

ERNIE X1 Turbo is a Baidu reasoning model released on 25 April 2025, positioned as a cheaper and more capable successor to ERNIE X1, with stronger chain-of-thought, multimodal and tool-use abilities.

Devstral is Mistral AI's family of open-weight models for agentic coding, first released in May 2025 with All Hands AI; the first version scored 46.8% on SWE-Bench Verified and could run on a single consumer GPU.

Hunyuan-A13B is Tencent's open-weight mixture-of-experts language model, released on 27 June 2025 with 80 billion total parameters, 13 billion active per token and a 256K context.

SenseNova V6.5 is SenseTime's enhanced multimodal model, announced in July 2025, built around interleaved image-text reasoning and powering an agent upgrade of the Raccoon assistant.

Claude Opus 4.1, released on 5 August 2025, upgraded Claude Opus 4 for agentic tasks, real-world coding and reasoning, at the same price. Anthropic later succeeded it with Claude Opus 4.5.

Cohere's first reasoning model, announced in August 2025: a 111-billion-parameter hybrid model that can switch its thinking on or off, built for agentic tasks and tool use, with open non-commercial weights.

A fast reasoning model from xAI for agentic coding, released in August 2025 with low per-token pricing, a 70.8% score on SWE-bench Verified, and integrations with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline and other coding tools.

UI-TARS-2 is a GUI agent trained with multi-turn reinforcement learning and released in September 2025 as an all-in-one upgrade to UI-TARS-1.5, with benchmark scores across web, desktop, Android, games and software-engineering tasks.

ERNIE X1.1 is Baidu's reasoning model unveiled in September 2025, an update to ERNIE X1 that the company reports as stronger in factuality, instruction following and agentic tasks, built on ERNIE 4.5 and released alongside PaddlePaddle v3.2.

An OpenAI model released in September 2025 that adapted GPT-5 for agentic coding, served as the default model in Codex, and was shut down in July 2026.

xAI's low-cost reasoning model released on 19 September 2025, with a 2-million-token context window and far lower prices than Grok 4 at comparable benchmark scores.

A pair of robotics models announced by Google DeepMind in September 2025: Gemini Robotics 1.5, a vision-language-action model that reasons in natural language before it moves, and Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, an embodied-reasoning planner that can call tools.

Claude Haiku 4.5, released on 15 October 2025 and available to all users, offered coding performance close to Sonnet 4 at one-third of the cost and more than twice the speed.

Grok 4.1 is xAI's November 2025 update to Grok 4, aimed at emotional intelligence, creative writing and fewer hallucinations. Grok 4.1 Fast, a 2-million-token tool-calling model, followed on 19 November 2025.

An agentic coding model in OpenAI's GPT-5.1 family, released in November 2025. It was the first OpenAI model trained to work across multiple context windows and in Windows environments, and served as the default model in Codex until its retirement in 2026.

MiniMax-M2.1 is an open-weight language model released in December 2025 as the successor to M2, aimed at software engineering and multilingual coding, with a 229B-parameter checkpoint and large reported gains on coding benchmarks.

Amazon Nova 2 is the second generation of Amazon's Nova models, released at AWS re:Invent in December 2025. Its first member, Nova 2 Lite, is a fast reasoning model available in Amazon Bedrock with a 1-million-token context.

Devstral 2 is Mistral AI's 123B-parameter agentic coding model, released in December 2025 alongside the Mistral Vibe CLI and scoring 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified. It was deprecated in May 2026 and retired that July, replaced by Mistral Medium 3.5.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 is an open family of hybrid mixture-of-experts language models, announced in December 2025 in Nano, Super and Ultra sizes, with up to one million tokens of context.

Doubao Large Model 1.8 (Doubao-Seed-1.8) is ByteDance's Volcano Engine flagship released on 18 December 2025. It is built for multimodal agent tasks, with stronger tool calling and computer-operation abilities.

Grok 4.20 is xAI's 2026 model family, released in reasoning, non-reasoning and multi-agent versions with a 1-million-token context window; Grok 4.3 followed with the same context and the same prices.

MiniMax-M2.7 is a 229B-parameter language model released by MiniMax in March 2026, built for agentic work and presented by the company as its first model to take part in its own improvement.

Kimi K2.6 is an open-weight Moonshot AI model released in April 2026, focused on long-horizon coding, with a 262,144-token context, text and image input, and Agent Swarm scaled to 300 sub-agents.

A 128B-parameter open-weights multimodal model from Mistral AI, listed in April 2026 for agentic and coding work, briefly the default in Le Chat before being superseded by Mistral Large 4.

ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu's large language model released on 9 May 2026, derived from ERNIE 5.0's pre-training at about 6% of the usual pre-training cost, and it placed at the top of Chinese models on LMArena text and search.[^1][^3]

Released on 28 May 2026 at the same price as Opus 4.7, Claude Opus 4.8 added a fast mode at 2.5 times the speed, with fewer unnoticed flaws in its own code. Anthropic called it a modest but tangible improvement.

Step 3.7 Flash is a StepFun open-weights model released on 29 May 2026. It adds native image input to Step 3.5 Flash, supports a 256K context, and is licensed under Apache 2.0.

GPT-Live-1 is OpenAI's full-duplex voice model family, launched 8 July 2026, which lets ChatGPT listen and speak at the same time and replaced the earlier chained speech pipeline in ChatGPT Voice.

Grok 4.5 is an xAI model built for coding, agentic and knowledge work, announced on 16 July 2026. It was trained with Cursor on tens of thousands of NVIDIA GB300 GPUs and shipped as the default model in the Grok Build coding tool.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is the Gemini model Google released on 21 July 2026 and called its workhorse: better coding, knowledge work and multimodal results than 3.5 Flash, fewer output tokens, built-in computer use and tiered pricing.

Grok 4.6 is an xAI language model released on 12 August 2026, built on Grok 4.5 and aimed at long-running agents and interactive, visual work, with a 500,000-token context window and text and image input.

A Google model released on 13 August 2026 as its most intelligent workhorse for coding and agents, priced with a scheduled increase and superseded three weeks later by 3.8 Flash.

iFlytek Spark X2.5 is a 293B-A30B mixture-of-experts language model released on 7 September 2026, trained and served entirely on domestic computing power, with a 256K context window and support for more than 200 languages.

Grok 4.7 is xAI's September 2026 flagship model for coding and knowledge work, built on a larger base model than Grok 4.6 with longer reinforcement learning and a new safeguard stack, at unchanged token prices.

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from MiniMax with about 428B total parameters, 23B activated per token, text, image and video input and up to 1M tokens of context, released on Hugging Face in October 2026.

SenseTime's multimodal agent model, announced in Hong Kong in November 2026, aimed at office work and design generation: long-term memory, task execution, and output ranging from PPTX decks to Blender 3D scenes.