Every frontier AI model released in 2026
17 releases from 5 labs, dated and month by month. Most trackers stop at the benchmark scores. This one carries the part that decides whether any of it reaches your desk: what each release made automatable, and what that costs.
- Releases tracked in 2026
- 17Releases tracked in 2026
- Frontier flagships
- 9Frontier flagships
- Labs shipping at the frontier
- 5Labs shipping at the frontier
Browse by month
No new flagship - the story moved to inference economics, and OpenAI's custom Jalapeño chip put a number on how much cheaper automation is about to get.
Three frontier releases: GPT-5.6's Sol, Terra and Luna tiers, Claude Opus 5, and Gemini 3.6 Flash - the month efficiency became the headline feature.
Anthropic opened the Claude 5 generation with Fable 5 and Mythos 5, introducing adaptive thinking effort.
No new flagship shipped in May - the frontier held at Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro while the industry absorbed April.
The April Sprint: seven releases in a month, with Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5 and DeepSeek V4 landing inside eight days.
OpenAI answered with GPT-5.4 and its 'Thinking' mode, extending frontier reasoning into finance, law and strategy work.
Three frontier models in fourteen days - Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro - opened the fastest release year on record.
The full 2026 timeline
| Date | Model | Lab | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jalapeño inference chip | OpenAI and Broadcom | Custom inference silicon, claimed ~50% lower cost per token | |
| Claude Opus 5 | Anthropic | Near-Fable-5 intelligence at roughly half the price | |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite | Google's most efficient agentic models to date | ||
| GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) | OpenAI | Tiered autonomous agents spanning cost and capability | |
| Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 | Anthropic | Adaptive thinking - reasoning effort scaled to the task | |
| DeepSeek V4 | DeepSeek | Near-frontier performance, released open source | |
| GPT-5.5 | OpenAI | Autonomous multi-step research and agentic coding | |
| Claude Design | Anthropic | Generative prototyping, built with Canva | |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | Elite software engineering with sustained multi-file consistency | |
| Gemma 4 | Open-weight models capable of running locally | ||
| Claude Mythos | Anthropic | Cybersecurity-specialised frontier model | |
| Claude Code | Anthropic | Agentic engineering rather than code assistance | |
| Claude Cowork | Anthropic | Agentic memory layer carrying context across a team | |
| GPT-5.4 | OpenAI | Flagship 'Thinking' mode - deliberate multi-step reasoning | |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | Multimodal reasoning across image, code and text | ||
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | Versatile coding at materially lower cost | |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | Anthropic | Advanced coding and agentic task execution |
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