The AI race is heating up as AI labs from all around the world are releasing frontier AI models with advanced capabilities. Currently, Western and Chinese AI models are delivering state-of-the-art performance in coding, mathematics, science, tool use, and more. So in this article, we have curated the 10 best AI models for different tasks. These are highly capable AI models and can solve challenging problems. On that note, let’s check out the list.
Best AI Models Compared
| AI Models | Best Suited For | Limitations | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.5 | Coding tasks, long-running agents, software planning, general chatting | Limited multimodal capabilities | Paid plan starts at $17 per month |
| Gemini 3 Pro | Great at multimodal tasks, Deep Think for challenging problems | Inferior response via Gemini, compared to API | Free, Paid plan starts at $20 per month |
| GPT 5.2 Pro | Professional knowledge work, math and science questions | Gets stuck in loop often | Costs $200 per month |
| Grok 4.1 | Pulling real-time data from X | Highly uncensored | Free, Paid plan starts at $30 per month |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Speciale | Mathematical reasoning, competitive programming | Verbose reasoning | Free, available via API |
| Qwen3 Max | Open-weight, capable AI model from China | Variable quality across providers | Free |
| GLM 4.7 | Affordable alternative to Claude Opus 4.5 for coding | Smaller community | Free |
| Kimi K2 Thinking | Agentic workflows with complex tool calls | Verbose reasoning traces | Free, Paid plan starts at $19 per month |
| Mistral Large 3 | Best AI model from Europe, great for European languages | Not frontier level | Free, paid plan starts at $14.99 per month |
| MiniMax M2.1 | Small and fast AI model from China, great for local coding | Weaker mathematical reasoning | Available via API |
1. Claude Opus 4.5
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 is arguably the best AI model for coding right now. It not only excels at coding, but in general, this is the best AI model for chatting, planning, agentic tool calling, and much more. Claude Opus 4.5 powers the Claude AI chatbot and Claude Code, and both AI tools deliver great performance. The free Claude Sonnet 4.5 is also excellent which is available to free users.
The secret sauce behind Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s “Soul” document which was discovered by users in December 2025. Anthropic acknowledged the Soul document, which makes it more genuine, honest, and likable. Anthropic is known for AI safety and alignment, and it reflects in how Claude Opus 4.5 interacts with users. In my opinion, Claude is a better AI chatbot and a great alternative to ChatGPT.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified, beats all competitor | Lacks some multimodal capabilities |
| Best AI model for coding | |
| Plans before coding |
2. GPT-5.2 Pro
After Claude Opus 4.5, if I have to pick one AI model, it would be OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro. It’s not available to free or ChatGPT Plus users. You need to subscribe to ChatGPT Pro plan which costs $200 per month. It nearly matches Claude Opus 4.5 in coding, but for science and math, GPT-5.2 Pro outranks nearly all AI models out there.
It’s thoroughly analytical and reasons smartly about any problem you throw at it. OpenAI uses extended thinking time for the GPT-5.2 Pro AI model, which results in better answers. There is also an xhigh variant which uses even more tokens to think through a problem. If you are dealing with analytical problems in math, science, and coding, I would highly recommend this AI model. It’s just the best out there.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Advanced reasoning for math, science, and challenging problems | Available via $200-per-month plan only |
| Excels at professional knowledge work | |
| Available via ChatGPT |
3. Gemini 3 Pro
I would place Google’s Gemini 3 Pro at the third position, following Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Pro. Google did take a huge leap with the release of Gemini 3 Pro, and outclassed many frontier AI models in various benchmarks, but for problem solving, it’s still somewhat behind Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Pro. That said, Gemini 3 Pro shines in multimodal queries.
It’s much better at processing and generating images. Gemini 3 Pro is also one of the few AI models that can process videos frame by frame and reason about anything. It can correctly transcribe audio, produce infographics, generate code to make apps, etc. For many, Gemini 3 Pro is the state-of-the-art AI model, but you need to use it via the API to get the best results.
By the way, Google also released its IMO and ICPC-winning AI model called Gemini 3 Deep Think for AI Ultra subscribers. It’s much more advanced at solving complex math, science, and logic problems.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Best AI model for multimodal queries | Less refined than Claude Opus 4.5 for coding |
| Generates great frontend code | |
| Deep Think mode for harder problems |
4. Grok 4.1
Elon Musk’s xAI has released its Grok 4.1 AI model and on the LMArena leaderboard, it’s ranked 3rd, just after Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash. xAI has done aggressive post-training using massive resources to improve the model performance. While Grok is pretty controversial for its uncensored behavior, there is no doubt that it’s also very capable.
In my earlier Grok 2 testing, I found that xAI has quickly trained a frontier AI model, in line with models from Google DeepMind and OpenAI. And the same trend continues with the Grok 4 series. In terms of emotional intelligence (EQ-Bench), Grok 4.1 has done better than many AI models out there. Not only that, xAI has also reduced hallucinations which is a great step.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Topped EQ Bench | Highly uncensored and controversial |
| Real-time access to X data | |
| Reduced hallucination |
5. DeepSeek V3.2 Speciale
After the success of DeepSeek R1, in December 2025, DeepSeek came up with a new reasoning model called DeepSeek V3.2 Speciale. It has achieved award-winning performance in IMO, CMO, ICPC, and IOI 2025. According to DeepSeek’s internal benchmarks, this model achieved gold-level results in all these international competitions. On top of that, on SWE-bench Verified, the model achieved 73.1%.
Basically, the DeepSeek team from China delivered a frontier AI model that rivals the performance of GPT-5 High and Gemini 3 Pro. And the best is that the model weights have been open-sourced. What is interesting about this model is that it’s very good at agentic tool calling. So be it math, coding, science, or tool calling, you can use this AI model for challenging problems.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Won Gold in IMO, CMO, ICPC, and IOI 2025 | Speciale model only available via API |
| Strong performance in math, coding, and science | |
| Optimized for agentic tool calling |
6. Qwen3 Max
After DeepSeek, Qwen3 Max is one of the best AI models from China and it’s giving a tough competition to Western AI labs. Developed by Alibaba, the Qwen 3 series of AI models was already a hit, and now the scaled-up Qwen3 Max improves the performance even further. In AIME 2025 which is a math test, the thinking version of Qwen3 Max achieved 100% result with Python.
It also posted competitive scores in GPQA, nearly matching GPT-5 Pro and Grok 4 Heavy. Qwen3 Max is the most capable AI model by Alibaba yet and the Chinese team is making progress at a breakneck pace. Not to mention, Alibaba is releasing the model weights under an open-source license so anyone can host and use it for free.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Open-weight, Apache 2.0 license | Variable quality across providers |
| Exceptional MoE performance | |
| Available in different sizes |
7. GLM 4.7
Z.ai, another Chinese AI lab, has released arguably the best open-source AI model called GLM 4.7. It’s a coding powerhouse and achieves 73.8% on SWE-bench Verified, slightly behind Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2. In LiveCodeBench too, GLM 4.7 has scored 84.9% which is remarkable. From GPQA to agentic benchmarks including Terminal Bench, GLM 4.7 outshines many frontier AI models.
What is impressive about Z.ai’s GLM 4.7 is that it achieved 42.8% on the challenging Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) with access to tools. This makes it one of the few AI models with state-of-the-art performance. What we see is that China’s AI models are pretty competitive, open-source, and almost on par with Western AI models.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Powerful open-weight AI model from China | API pricing higher than DeepSeek/Qwen |
| Better frontend UI generation | |
| Scored 42.8% on HLE |
8. Kimi K2 Thinking
In November 2025, Moonshot AI from China released Kimi K2 Thinking, which is an open-source reasoning model. It has been designed like a thinking agent that can invoke tools and perform actions as well. It can perform multi-step reasoning while performing 200-300 calls without any issue. As it’s a Mixture of Expert (MoE) model, Kimi K2 Thinking is trained on a total of 1 trillion parameters with 32 billion activated parameters.
What is astounding is that a heavy variant of Kimi K2 Thinking achieves 51% on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) with tool use. Similarly, in GPQA, Kimi K2 Thinking scores 84.5% and in AIME 2025, the model has saturated the benchmark. Overall, this AI model from China is quite capable and you should definitely give it a try.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Stable tool calling across 200-300 calls | Language mixing issues |
| Efficient MoE AI Model | |
| Scored 51% on HLE |
9. Mistral Large 3
Mistral AI is Europe’s best AI company and its latest Mistral Large 3 AI model has gained much traction from around the world. It’s an open-weight (Apache 2.0) multimodal model, built on MoE architecture. There are a total of 675B parameters, of which 41 billion are activated. Mistral calls it the state-of-the-art open-weight AI model for multimodal queries.
Mistral Large 3 is more consistent and can be used for RAG, agentic workflows, production-grade AI assistants, and more. In fact, Mistral’s Le Chat is powered by this AI model. I would say, if you are from Europe, and looking for an AI model that is well-versed with European languages, Mistral Large 3 is a great choice.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Best AI model from Europe | Doesn’t match frontier AI models |
| Excels at European languages | |
| Capable open-weight, multimodal AI model |
10. MiniMax M2.1
Finally, we have the last AI model and it’s from China again. MiniMax M2.1 was just released in December 2025, and it’s been trained by MiniMaxAI. It has been optimized for coding, tool use, instruction following, and long-horizon planning. In SWE-bench Verified, MiniMax M2.1 scored 74%, which is below Claude Opus 4.5 (80.9%).
However, it has only 230B parameters and only 10B parameters are active. It means that the model is much smaller, and yet, it performs exceptionally well. You can in fact run it on consumer GPU with enough VRAM. Thanks to the smaller size, its inference speed is around 150 tokens per second. I think for local coding tasks, MiniMax M2.1 is a great AI model.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Great speed, and small size | Weaker mathematical reasoning |
| Best coding performance for its size | |
| Run on local hardware |
So that wraps up our list of best AI models in 2026. As the AI race continues to heat up, new AI models will be released with even advanced capabilities. We will be updating the article with new AI model releases so stay tuned with us.
