Leaderboard · News
LLM Rank News
A monthly, data-driven readout on where the LLM market is — who's on top, what fell in price, and what's worth switching to. No hype, no "transformative paradigm shifts" — just the numbers and what they mean for your bill.
Monthly snapshots
One post a month. We pull from the live leaderboard on the day of writing, summarise the moves that matter, and flag the price changes that should make you rethink your defaults.
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· Monthly snapshot
State of the LLM Market — May 2026 snapshot
GPT-5 still leads on composite, but the top 5 cluster inside a 5-point band. The cheap tier did all the work this cycle — sub-$1 / 1M output is now a fully populated tier, and Phi-4 at $0.07 input gets you 80% of GPT-5's MMLU-Pro for 1.8% of the price. Open-weights have closed the gap on knowledge-recall but still trail by ~26 points on SWE-Bench.
What we cover
- Leaderboard moves — composite-score shifts on the top 10, and which benchmarks drove them.
- Price changes — every API price update across the 30 tracked models, with cost-per-quality recalculated.
- New launches — when a frontier or notable open-weights model ships, what it actually changes.
- Cheap-tier consolidation — sub-$1 / 1M output is where most production buying decisions are made now; we track it closely.
- Open vs closed — the gap on agentic coding (SWE-Bench), tool-use, and multi-turn reasoning. Where open-weights are catching up, and where they still aren't.
Editorial principles
- Numbers from the live leaderboard. Every claim links to the underlying model page; if the number on the page changes, the article is stale and we say so.
- Sponsorship can't move the rankings. See the sponsor page for what we will and won't do.
- Affiliate disclosure on every page. The "Try OpenRouter" links are affiliate. The leaderboard, prices, and verdicts are not.
- Corrections within 24h. Spotted a stale number? Open an issue.
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