My personal, honest ranking of the major AI models. I use most of these daily - these opinions are earned, not borrowed.
Last updated: November 2026
GPT-6 Astra · GPT-6.1 Sol · Terra · Luna · Codex · Dots
The tie is broken. OpenAI pulled back into the lead for me this fall and I have been in Codex almost exclusively since GPT-6 - Astra in a September 3 preview, Sol and Luna on September 22 at half the 5.6 price, GPT-6.1 Sol as the Codex default in early October, Terra on October 26. I cannot fully explain the pull and I would rather admit that than invent a reason. Dots, the always-on agent launched at DevDay on September 29, is the only one of this season's four persistent agents I have actually lived in; between Codex and Dots, OpenAI runs twenty-plus tasks a day for me as the builder, while the other labs still review the output through an automated adversarial pass. That is the second reason this slot is OpenAI's alone.
chatgpt.comFable 5.1 · Opus 5.5 · Sonnet 5.5 · Haiku 5.5 · Claude Duet
Still S Tier, one slot down, and the drop is about my habits, not Anthropic's output. Fable 5.1 shipped September 1, Opus 5.5 on September 22, Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, Haiku 5.5 on October 7, and Claude Duet on October 21 - a proactive agent on Opus 5.5 that works while you are away and asks before it sends, pays, signs, or deletes anything, which is exactly the posture I want from an agent. I have not tried Duet yet. Claude Code and Codex remain interchangeable brains pointed at the same files in my shop, which is why this change cost me nothing.
claude.aiGemini 4 Argon · Gemini 3.5 Flash · Gemini Omni
The best four months in the history of this ranking, and still A Tier, which tells you where the bar is. Gemini 4 Argon was announced September 30 and opened globally October 13 with a 1M-token output limit. And the thing this page doubted for six months finally happened: iOS 27 shipped September 14 with the rebuilt Siri running on a custom Gemini model. Reviewers call it practical rather than dazzling and it is still beta in most regions, but it is the largest distribution deal in consumer AI, in production. Still my pick for brainstorming, image, and video. On long, stateful system work it still drifts where Sol and Fable finish.
gemini.google.comMistral Large 4 (open weights) · Mistral Small 4 · Robostral Navigate
Up a tier, and I called it in July. The open-weight frontier model I said to watch is now Mistral Large 4: public API preview on October 6, and on October 29 the weights themselves - a roughly trillion-parameter model you can download. With Llama's frontier effort shelved and Meta's new models closed or paid, Mistral is the de facto leader of open-source AI by default and by delivery. The steepest trajectory on this page is now a position.
mistral.aiMuse Wonder (paid) · Muse Spark Open · Muse agent · Llama 4
Down a tier, and renamed, because the thing being ranked is not Llama anymore. Since July: a consumer Muse agent on September 8 that Amazon blocked from its retail site, Muse Wonder on October 12 - Meta's first frontier-class model and its first paid one, at $20 or $100 a month - and Muse Spark Open on October 15, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight mixture-of-experts as a consolation to the community Llama built. Credit for the engineering. But I have not spent much time with Muse, and the reason is simple: I do not trust Meta with the data layer. The open-source crown has passed to Paris.
ai.meta.comPerplexity Computer · Personal Computer · Deep Research · Comet Browser
Holds. A quieter quarter than the spring - a faster search tier in late September, incremental model updates in October - and the narrow-playbook thesis keeps paying out without needing a headline. Still no ads. Still my front door for research. Nothing to re-rank, which is its own kind of compliment.
perplexity.aiGrok Bot (beta) · Grok 4.7 · Grok Build
xAI shipped the first of the season's always-on agents - Grok Bot, in beta August 11, a persistent agent on its own cloud machine with a browser, a terminal, and a clever teach-it-by-screen-recording trick. I have not touched it and do not intend to. I have worked more with Grok itself this fall, and the read is unchanged: technically improving, still fringy in a way that has nothing to do with benchmarks. The deepfake litigation is now five cases before one federal judge, who denied xAI's two larger requests in late September. Grok 5, promised since January, still has not shipped.
x.aiDeepSeek-V4.1 Flash · V4 Pro · DeepSeek-R1
Keeps doing what it does: shipping fast and cheap under an MIT license, most recently a V4.1 Flash refresh in mid-October. The engineering-per-dollar story is still real. The trust math is exactly where it was - CCP alignment baked in at the model layer, distillation accusations still standing. If you handle sensitive data, nothing that happened this fall changes the variable that matters. Nope, with the same asterisk of technical respect.
chat.deepseek.comThe AI models above don't just live in chatbots. They're quietly powering the products you already use every day. Here's who's running what under the hood - and one very notable absence.
The deepest OpenAI integration. GPT-6 Astra joined Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio on September 3, the same day it previewed, grounded in user data through Work IQ for delegated knowledge work. The 6.1 tiers route per task underneath.
Claude handles the heavy thinking; Amazon's Nova models take the simpler tasks. Routed via Amazon Bedrock - "we pick the model that's right for the job." Amazon's $8B investment in Anthropic at work.
Gemini powers voice commands and cross-app actions. Samsung's in-house Gauss models handle on-device processing. Their TVs add Copilot and Perplexity into the mix too.
Meta eating their own cooking, with a new recipe. The Muse family now sits behind Meta AI and the standalone Muse agent across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook - 3+ billion potential users on a model that went proprietary this year. Llama remains the open legacy line.
The old Google Assistant is being phased out in favor of Gemini across Android and Pixel devices. Gemini Live handles real-time voice conversations natively.
Shipped. iOS 27 arrived September 14 with the rebuilt Siri: a custom Gemini model handles the heavy queries, with on-device models for simple requests and Private Cloud Compute in the middle, under a multi-year deal reported at roughly $1B a year. Reviewers call it practical rather than dazzling, it is still beta in most regions, and it is the biggest distribution deal in consumer AI actually in production. The notable absence on this map is finally gone.
One thing most people don't realize: every major AI model has a measurable political lean. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have mapped these models on political compass-style charts. Here's what the research says.
| Model | Political Lean | What the Research Found |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Left-Leaning | Consistently the furthest left across multiple studies. OpenAI's own evaluation found emotionally charged liberal prompts exert the largest pull on objectivity. GPT-5 shows improvement over GPT-4o. |
| Claude | Most Centrist | Earlier studies found liberal-leaning; by 2025, Promptfoo measured it as the most centrist model at 0.646 (0.5 = true center). Anthropic actively publishes their political even-handedness methodology. |
| Gemini | Moderate Left | Stanford study found users perceived it as the least slanted overall. Measured further left than Claude but more moderate than ChatGPT. Generally centrist on social issues. |
| Llama | Right-Leaning (Relative) | The 2023 ACL award-winning paper found it was the most right-wing authoritarian of the 14 models tested. An outlier in the open-source space. |
| Perplexity | Libertarian-Right | The IEEE study found it exhibited a "libertarian capitalistic stance" - more conservative than its peers. An interesting position for a search-focused product. |
| Grok | Chaotic | Despite xAI's "less woke" marketing, studies found the highest extremism rate at 67.9% - wild swings between far-left and far-right. Promptfoo called it "designed to be contrarian rather than ideological." Even Pew's quiz placed it as an "establishment liberal." |
| DeepSeek | CCP-Aligned | Not left or right on a Western spectrum — state-aligned. 1,156 documented censored topics including Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Xi Jinping. Responses shift by language: Chinese queries get Party-line answers, English queries get more nuanced takes. Censorship is embedded at the model level, not just the app layer. |
All major AI models lean left on economics (wealth taxes, minimum wage). No study has found a consistently conservative AI among industry leaders.
These rankings are entirely my own opinion based on daily use. Your mileage may vary. I have no financial relationship with any of these companies.
Well, except that Claude literally built this page - and this month, Claude Fable 5.1 drafted the update that ranks its own maker second. Make of that what you will.
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