AI race

Who is winning the AI race?

OpenAI leads the AI race as of October 2026 with GPT-6 Astra at #1. US labs hold 39 of the top 50 ranked models and Chinese labs 11; in the top 10 the split is 10 to 0.

Last verified October 10, 2026

Top-50 models by region

United States 39
China 11
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Labs ranked by their best model

Lab	Best model	Rank	Score	In top 10	In top 50	Releases, 90 days
OpenAI	GPT-6 Astra	#1	70.8	5	14	4
Anthropic	Claude Fable 5.1	#2	69.0	5	11	5
Google	Gemini 3.8 Flash	#11	61.8	0	8	6
Moonshot AI	Kimi K3	#15	59.5	0	1	1
xAI	Grok 4.6	#21	56.9	0	3	2
Alibaba (Qwen)	Qwen3.8 Max	#22	56.8	0	3	6
Z.ai (Zhipu)	GLM-5.3	#26	54.8	0	3	3
Meta	Muse Spark 1.3	#27	54.8	0	3	5
DeepSeek	DeepSeek V4 Pro	#31	54.3	0	3	2
Xiaomi	MiMo-V2.6-Pro	#49	50.3	0	1	3
StepFun	Step 5 Preview	#58	47.9	0	0	1
Thinking Machines Lab	Inkling-Small	#63	46.5	0	0	2
Tencent	Hy4 preview	#73	45.3	0	0	1
Amazon	Amazon Nova Experimental Chat 26 02 10	#77	44.5	0	0	0
Baidu	ERNIE 5.1	#83	43.8	0	0	0
MiniMax	MiniMax-M3	#85	43.8	0	0	0
ByteDance Seed	Seed 2.0 Pro	#96	43.2	0	0	0
Mistral AI	Mistral Large 4	#99	43.1	0	0	1
NVIDIA	Nemotron 3 Ultra	#113	42.5	0	0	1
Meituan	Longcat Flash Chat	#120	42.1	0	0	0
Upstage	Solar Pro4	#121	42.1	0	0	1
IBM	Granite 4.2 30b	#130	41.8	0	0	0
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)	Olmo 3.1 32b Instruct	#168	39.4	0	0	0
Inception	Mercury 2	#175	39.1	0	0	1
Arcee AI	Trinity Large Thinking	#185	38.6	0	0	0
Perplexity	Sonar	#187	38.5	0	0	0
01.AI	Yi-Lightning	#209	37.1	0	0	0
Cohere	Command A	#215	36.5	0	0	0
Microsoft	Wizardlm 70b	#249	33.0	0	0	0
Poolside	Laguna M.1	#256	32.5	0	0	1
Technology Innovation Institute	Falcon-180B	#260	32.2	0	0	0
Databricks	DBRX	#311	29.4	0	0	0

How the lead has changed since 2023 →

Frequently asked questions

Who is winning the AI race?

OpenAI leads the AI race as of October 2026 with GPT-6 Astra at #1. US labs hold 39 of the top 50 ranked models and Chinese labs 11; in the top 10 the split is 10 to 0.

Is China catching up in AI models?

Chinese labs have 11 models in the Noometry top 50 and 0 in the top 10 as of October 2026. Their best models are mostly open-weight, which the US frontier mostly is not.