Best Foundation Models for Vercel AI Gateway

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s new state-of-the-art Opus model for coding, knowledge work, automation, science, and everyday AI assistance. The model is designed to provide near-frontier intelligence at a lower cost than Claude Fable 5 while keeping the same base pricing as Opus 4.8. Claude Opus 5 performs strongly on software engineering benchmarks, business task automation, computer use, novel problem solving, visual generation, and scientific research tasks. Users can adjust effort settings to trade off intelligence, speed, and token usage depending on the task. The model is also better at verifying its work, iterating carefully, building test harnesses, debugging root causes, and solving multi-step engineering problems. Anthropic highlights improvements in life sciences, including structural biology, organic chemistry, bioinformatics, and protein-related tasks. Claude Opus 5 includes alignment and safety safeguards designed to support beneficial work while blocking higher-risk cybersecurity and biology misuse. It is available through Claude.ai, Claude Max, Claude Pro, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude API under the model name claude-opus-5. By combining stronger reasoning, coding ability, scientific capability, configurable effort, Fast mode, and enterprise-ready deployment options, Claude Opus 5 gives users a powerful model for demanding daily work.

GPT-5.6 Luna is OpenAI’s fast, cost-efficient model in the GPT-5.6 lineup. The GPT-5.6 family includes Sol for flagship performance, Terra for balanced everyday work, and Luna for strong capability at the lowest listed price. Luna is designed for users who need scalable AI support for routine tasks, coding assistance, workflow automation, analysis, and production API use cases where speed and cost matter. According to the pasted preview text, Luna is priced below both Sol and Terra, making it the most affordable GPT-5.6 option for high-volume workloads. The model is included in GPT-5.6 benchmark previews across Terminal-Bench 2.1, GeneBench v1, ExploitBench, and ExploitGym, showing that it is part of the same technical family used for coding, biology, and cybersecurity evaluations. Luna benefits from safeguards developed across the GPT-5.6 series, including model-level refusal training, real-time cyber and biology misuse classifiers, account-level signals, differentiated access, monitoring, enforcement, and ongoing testing. These controls are designed to preserve legitimate use cases such as debugging, code review, defensive testing, security education, and productivity automation while constraining prohibited misuse. GPT-5.6 Luna is planned for broader access through ChatGPT, Codex, and the API after the limited preview period. GPT-5.6 Luna helps developers and organizations run useful AI workflows with a practical balance of affordability, responsiveness, and safety.

Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic’s most capable generally available AI model, built to tackle demanding tasks across software development, research, business analysis, scientific exploration, and enterprise productivity. The model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in coding, reasoning, visual understanding, long-context processing, and autonomous task execution. Claude Fable 5 can analyze large codebases, interpret complex documents and datasets, generate detailed reports, and assist with advanced decision-making processes. Its enhanced memory capabilities allow it to remain effective during long-running workflows and multi-step projects. The model also delivers strong performance in image analysis, chart interpretation, scientific reasoning, and technical problem-solving. Anthropic has incorporated advanced safety classifiers that detect certain high-risk topics and automatically redirect those interactions to a more restricted model experience. These safeguards are designed to reduce misuse while still providing productive assistance for legitimate users. Claude Fable 5 is available through the Claude platform and API, enabling developers and organizations to integrate advanced AI capabilities into their applications and workflows. The platform is designed to help businesses improve productivity, accelerate innovation, and streamline complex knowledge work.

GLM-5.2 is a next-generation large language model built for users who need strong reasoning, coding support, and agentic AI capabilities. It can assist with complex software development tasks, technical problem-solving, automation workflows, and advanced research projects. The model is designed to process long-context information, which makes it helpful for analyzing large documents, reviewing codebases, and maintaining continuity across multi-step tasks. GLM-5.2 supports developers and organizations that want to create AI-powered tools capable of planning, reasoning, and executing more sophisticated workflows. Its architecture is structured to deliver high performance while improving efficiency for demanding AI use cases. Businesses can use GLM-5.2 to enhance productivity, streamline engineering processes, and build more capable intelligent applications. It is also useful for teams that need AI assistance across documentation, data interpretation, coding, testing, and workflow automation. The model’s emphasis on agentic engineering makes it well-suited for applications that require more than simple text generation. GLM-5.2 provides a flexible AI foundation for companies looking to bring advanced reasoning and automation into their products or internal operations.

Claude Mythos 5 is a frontier AI model from Anthropic created for highly trusted users working on advanced cybersecurity, infrastructure protection, and scientific research. It is based on the same core model as Claude Fable 5, but certain safeguards are lifted for approved partners operating under restricted access programs. The model offers exceptional performance across software engineering, cybersecurity analysis, autonomous development workflows, scientific reasoning, visual understanding, and long-context tasks. In cybersecurity, Claude Mythos 5 is positioned for cyberdefenders and critical infrastructure providers who need advanced AI support for securing complex systems. In life sciences, the model has demonstrated strong capabilities in drug design, protein research, molecular biology, and genomics. Claude Mythos 5 can perform long-running research and technical workflows with minimal high-level human input. Anthropic designed the model for controlled deployment because its advanced capabilities could create misuse risks if broadly available without safeguards. Access is initially limited to Project Glasswing partners, with broader trusted access programs planned for cybersecurity and select biology researchers. Claude Mythos 5 helps approved organizations apply powerful AI to high-impact technical and scientific challenges while operating within a stricter governance model.

Gemini 3.7 Flash represents Google's most advanced model for coding and agents, exhibiting significant enhancements in software engineering, knowledge-intensive tasks, web design, and intricate business processes. It excels in debugging and resolving issues, showcasing greater accuracy in first-pass code creation and a refined ability to generate code that is ready for production. When applied to web development, this model produces more functional designs and fully-featured applications with fewer prompts, maintaining strong adherence to design principles derived from screenshots, images, or comprehensive design systems. In fields with high knowledge requirements, such as finance, law, and biosciences, it enhances reasoning capabilities, precision, and comprehension of complex documents. Additionally, Gemini 3.7 Flash demonstrates superior performance in automating real-world workflows and executing multimodal tasks, catering to a range of applications from interactive web experiences and data storytelling to robotics and the creation of dynamically generated 3D content. Overall, its versatility makes it a powerful tool for a variety of professional domains.

Gemini 3.6 Flash is Google’s workhorse Flash model for developers and enterprises building production AI agents at scale. The model is designed to deliver higher quality than Gemini 3.5 Flash while improving token efficiency, latency, and overall task cost. Google says Gemini 3.6 Flash uses 17% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash on the Artificial Analysis Index and can show even larger efficiency gains on certain software engineering benchmarks. It is priced lower than 3.5 Flash at $1.50 per 1 million input tokens and $7.50 per 1 million output tokens. Gemini 3.6 Flash improves performance in coding, ML research, computer use, knowledge work, document parsing, chart analysis, report drafting, and data-heavy workflows. The model also supports built-in computer use through the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise, making it more useful for agentic systems that need to operate across digital environments. Google highlights customer use cases involving financial transcript analysis, code migrations, visual workflows, and interactive design tools. The model includes enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards for CBRN and cyber offense misuse while aiming to reduce unnecessary refusals for beneficial uses. By combining efficiency, stronger reasoning, multimodal ability, computer use, and enterprise availability, Gemini 3.6 Flash gives teams a practical model for scaling AI agents in production.

GPT-5.6 Terra is OpenAI’s balanced GPT-5.6 model for users who need strong performance across everyday work, development tasks, enterprise workflows, and technical analysis. The model is part of the GPT-5.6 family alongside Sol and Luna, with Terra positioned as the middle tier for capable, cost-efficient use. Terra is described as having competitive performance to GPT-5.5 while being 2x cheaper, making it useful for teams that want advanced capability without always using the flagship model. It supports coding workflows, agentic tasks, cybersecurity-related defensive work, biology workflows, knowledge work, and tool-assisted automation. In benchmark previews, Terra appears alongside Sol and Luna in evaluations for coding, biology, ExploitBench, and ExploitGym. The model benefits from the GPT-5.6 safeguard stack, which includes model-level refusals for prohibited cyber assistance, real-time cyber and biology misuse classifiers, and account-level risk review. These safeguards are designed to preserve access to legitimate work such as code review, debugging, vulnerability research, patch development, security education, and defensive testing. GPT-5.6 Terra is planned for availability through the API, Codex, and broader OpenAI products after the limited preview period. GPT-5.6 Terra helps teams get a balanced model for high-quality AI work when they need strong reasoning and automation at a lower cost than Sol.

Kimi K3 is a large-scale AI model from Moonshot AI designed for advanced reasoning, software engineering, visual understanding, agentic workflows, and knowledge work. The model is built with 2.8 trillion parameters and uses Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention design created to support long-context intelligence. It also includes Attention Residuals and a native 1 million token context window, giving developers room to work with large files, repositories, documentation sets, transcripts, and enterprise knowledge bases. Kimi K3 always runs with thinking mode enabled and currently supports maximum reasoning effort by default. Developers can access the model through Moonshot’s OpenAI-compatible API using Python, cURL, and the OpenAI SDK. The API supports standard chat completions, streaming output, structured JSON Schema responses, partial continuation from a prefix, custom tool calling, required tool choice, and dynamic tool loading. Kimi K3 also supports vision inputs, including local images encoded as base64 and video files uploaded through the file API. Automatic context caching helps repeated long-prefix workflows become more efficient without requiring manual cache IDs or extra cache parameters. By combining long context, visual understanding, tool use, structured output, and advanced reasoning, Kimi K3 is built for developers creating sophisticated AI agents, coding systems, research tools, and enterprise applications.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google’s high-performance multimodal AI model built to deliver frontier-level intelligence, fast execution speeds, and advanced agentic capabilities for coding, automation, and enterprise workflows. As the first release in the Gemini 3.5 series, the model is designed to help developers, businesses, and users execute complex long-horizon tasks through AI-powered reasoning, workflow orchestration, and intelligent automation. Gemini 3.5 Flash combines powerful coding performance, multimodal understanding, and real-time responsiveness while outperforming earlier Gemini models and competing frontier AI systems across several coding and reasoning benchmarks. The model is optimized for agentic workflows, allowing it to plan, execute, and manage multi-step tasks such as software development, infrastructure management, document preparation, and business process automation through the updated Antigravity harness. Gemini 3.5 Flash can also deploy collaborative subagents that work together under supervision to complete demanding workflows more efficiently and at lower operational cost. Beyond coding and automation, the platform generates richer graphics, dynamic web interfaces, interactive animations, and advanced multimodal experiences that support developers and enterprise users building AI-driven applications. Google has integrated Gemini 3.5 Flash across the Gemini app, AI Mode in Google Search, Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and enterprise AI services to expand access to advanced AI capabilities globally. The model also powers Gemini Spark, Google’s new personal AI agent designed to operate continuously and assist users with digital life management and automated task execution.

Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is a dedicated model designed specifically for cybersecurity, built upon Gemini 3.5 Flash, and refined to efficiently discover, validate, and resolve vulnerabilities at scale. Its primary objective is to support defensive security operations by enabling organizations to quickly pinpoint critical vulnerabilities and produce dependable patches before they can be exploited. The remarkable blend of performance and efficiency offered by Flash provides an excellent basis for code scanning, assessing security issues, confirming the authenticity of findings, and suggesting precise remediation strategies within extensive software environments. In the CodeMender framework, numerous Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber agents collaborate seamlessly, merging their insights into a comprehensive report that enhances the system's ability to analyze vulnerabilities from various perspectives and elevate the overall quality of the findings. This collaborative agent framework ensures exceptional performance on CyberGym, which serves as a benchmark for assessing cybersecurity effectiveness, while also fostering continuous improvement in vulnerability management practices. Ultimately, the capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber not only streamline security workflows but also strengthen an organization's resilience against potential threats.

GPT-5.5 is a next-generation AI system built for execution-heavy workflows across coding, research, business analysis, and scientific tasks. It can interpret complex instructions, break them into actionable steps, and carry them through to completion while interacting with tools and systems. The model supports creating applications, generating reports, analyzing datasets, and navigating software environments seamlessly. It also integrates with workspace agents—custom AI agents that automate recurring and multi-step processes across teams. These agents can handle tasks such as lead research, reporting, and workflow automation, either on demand or on schedules. GPT-5.5 enhances productivity by reducing manual effort and enabling continuous task execution across tools. With enterprise-grade safeguards and monitoring, it ensures secure and controlled automation. It is well-suited for organizations looking to scale operations and improve efficiency through AI-driven workflows.

Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic’s newest flagship AI model built to improve coding performance, reasoning accuracy, agentic task execution, and collaborative AI workflows for developers, enterprises, and advanced productivity use cases. The model serves as an upgrade to Claude Opus 4.7, delivering measurable improvements across benchmarks related to coding, practical reasoning, software engineering, and autonomous task management while maintaining the same pricing structure for standard usage. One of the most significant improvements in Claude Opus 4.8 is its enhanced honesty and judgment during complex tasks, reducing the likelihood of unsupported claims, hidden errors, or overlooked flaws in generated code and analytical outputs. Anthropic’s evaluations show that Opus 4.8 is substantially less likely than previous versions to allow software defects or reasoning mistakes to pass without flagging uncertainty or requesting clarification. The platform introduces new effort control settings that allow users to adjust how deeply the model reasons through tasks, balancing response quality, processing depth, speed, and token usage depending on workflow requirements. Claude Opus 4.8 also powers new dynamic workflow functionality in Claude Code, enabling the model to coordinate hundreds of parallel subagents within a single session to handle large-scale software engineering tasks such as codebase migrations and extensive automation projects. The model supports high-speed fast mode processing, now significantly more affordable than previous versions, while also offering higher-effort reasoning modes optimized for difficult coding and operational workflows.

Claude Opus 4.7 is an advanced AI model built to push the boundaries of software engineering, automation, and complex reasoning tasks. Compared to Opus 4.6, it delivers notable improvements in handling challenging coding workflows and executing long-duration tasks with consistency. The model excels at strictly following user instructions, reducing ambiguity and improving output accuracy. It also introduces stronger self-verification capabilities, allowing it to check and refine its own results before presenting them. One of its key upgrades is enhanced multimodal functionality, particularly its ability to process higher-resolution images with greater clarity. This enables more precise analysis of visuals such as technical diagrams, dense screenshots, and structured data layouts. Opus 4.7 is also more refined in generating professional content, including polished documents, presentations, and interface designs. In real-world applications, it performs effectively across domains like finance, legal analysis, and business workflows. The model incorporates improved memory features, allowing it to retain context across extended sessions and reduce repetitive input requirements. It also introduces built-in safeguards to detect and prevent misuse, especially in sensitive cybersecurity scenarios. With broad availability across APIs and cloud platforms, Opus 4.7 offers developers and enterprises a powerful, scalable AI solution.

Grok 4.3 is an advanced AI model developed by xAI to provide enhanced reasoning, real-time insights, and automation capabilities. It builds on the Grok 4 architecture, which already includes features like real-time web browsing, multimodal processing, and tool integration. The model is designed to handle complex tasks such as coding, research, and data analysis with improved accuracy and efficiency. Grok 4.3 is integrated with live data sources, including the web and X, allowing it to deliver timely and relevant information. It operates within the SuperGrok Heavy subscription tier, which provides access to its most powerful capabilities. The model supports long-context understanding, enabling it to process large amounts of information in a single session. It also includes multi-agent or “heavy” configurations that enhance problem-solving performance. Grok 4.3 is optimized for speed and responsiveness, making it suitable for real-time applications. It can generate content, answer questions, and assist with workflows across various domains. The platform continues to evolve with new features and improvements aimed at increasing reliability and performance. Overall, Grok 4.3 offers a powerful AI solution for users who need real-time, high-level intelligence and automation.

GLM-5.1 represents the latest advancement in Z.ai’s GLM series, crafted as a cutting-edge, agent-focused AI model tailored for coding, reasoning, and managing long-term workflows. This iteration builds upon the framework of GLM-5, which employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to achieve high performance without incurring excessive inference expenses, aligning with a larger initiative towards open-weight models that are accessible to developers. A significant emphasis of GLM-5.1 is on fostering agentic behavior, allowing it to plan, execute, and refine multi-step tasks instead of merely reacting to isolated prompts. Its capabilities are specifically engineered to manage intricate workflows, such as debugging code, exploring repositories, and performing sequential operations while maintaining context over time. In comparison to its predecessors, GLM-5.1 enhances reliability during lengthy interactions, ensuring coherence throughout extended sessions and minimizing failures in multi-step reasoning processes. Overall, this model signifies a leap forward in AI development, particularly in its ability to support complex task management seamlessly.

Kimi K2.6 is an advanced agentic AI model created by Moonshot AI, aiming to enhance practical implementation, programming, and complex reasoning compared to its predecessors, K2 and K2.5. This model is based on a Mixture-of-Experts framework and the multimodal, agent-centric principles of the Kimi series, merging language comprehension, coding capabilities, and tool utilization into one cohesive system that can plan and execute intricate workflows. It features enhanced reasoning skills and significantly better agent planning, enabling it to deconstruct tasks, synchronize various tools, and tackle multi-file or multi-step challenges with increased precision and effectiveness. Additionally, it provides robust tool-calling capabilities with a high degree of reliability, facilitating seamless integration with external platforms like web searches or APIs, and incorporates built-in validation systems to guarantee the accuracy of execution formats. Notably, Kimi K2.6 represents a significant leap forward in the realm of AI, setting new standards for the complexity and reliability of automated tasks.

GPT-5.5 Pro is a next-generation AI model built for execution-heavy tasks across coding, research, business analysis, and scientific workflows. It can interpret complex instructions, break them into steps, and carry work through to completion using tools and automation. The model supports tasks such as generating documents, building applications, analyzing datasets, and navigating software environments. It is designed to operate across tools, enabling seamless workflows from idea to output. In addition, GPT-5.5 Pro integrates with workspace agents—customizable AI agents that automate recurring and multi-step processes across teams. These agents can handle tasks like lead research, reporting, and workflow automation, running independently or on schedules. Built with enterprise-grade safeguards, the model ensures secure and controlled automation. It helps organizations improve productivity by reducing manual effort and accelerating decision-making. GPT-5.5 Pro is ideal for teams looking to scale operations and handle complex workloads efficiently.

Qwen3.6-Plus is a state-of-the-art AI model designed to support real-world agentic applications, advanced coding, and multimodal reasoning. Developed by the Qwen team under Alibaba Cloud, it offers a significant upgrade over previous versions with improved performance across coding, reasoning, and tool usage tasks. The model features a 1 million token context window, enabling it to handle long and complex workflows with high accuracy. It excels in agentic coding scenarios, including debugging, repository-level problem solving, and automated development tasks. Qwen3.6-Plus integrates reasoning, memory, and execution into a unified system, allowing it to operate as a highly capable autonomous agent. Its multimodal capabilities enable it to process and analyze text, images, videos, and documents for deeper insights. The model supports real-time tool usage and long-horizon planning, making it ideal for enterprise and developer use cases. It is accessible via API through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio and integrates with popular coding tools and assistants. Developers can leverage features like preserved reasoning context to improve performance in multi-step tasks. Overall, Qwen3.6-Plus empowers businesses and developers to build intelligent, scalable, and autonomous AI-driven applications.

Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5-Pro is a next-generation open-source AI model designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and long-horizon task execution. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with over one trillion parameters and a large active parameter set for efficient performance. The model supports an extended context window of up to one million tokens, allowing it to handle complex, multi-step workflows. It is built to perform autonomous tasks, including software development, system design, and engineering optimization. Benchmark results show strong performance across coding, reasoning, and agent-based evaluation tests. MiMo-V2.5-Pro incorporates hybrid attention mechanisms to improve efficiency while maintaining accuracy across long contexts. It is optimized for token efficiency, reducing the computational cost of running complex tasks. The model can integrate with development tools and frameworks to support real-world applications. It is designed to complete tasks that would typically require significant human effort over extended periods. Xiaomi has made the model open source, enabling developers to access and customize it. By combining performance, scalability, and efficiency, MiMo-V2.5-Pro pushes the boundaries of modern AI capabilities.

Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 is a next-generation open-source AI model that combines agentic intelligence with multimodal capabilities. It is designed to process and understand text, images, and audio within a single architecture. The model uses a sparse Mixture-of-Experts framework with a large parameter count to deliver efficient and scalable performance. It supports a context window of up to one million tokens, allowing it to handle long and complex workflows. MiMo-V2.5 integrates visual and audio encoders to improve perception and cross-modal reasoning. It is capable of performing tasks such as coding, reasoning, and multimodal analysis with strong accuracy. Benchmark results show competitive performance compared to leading AI models in both agentic and multimodal tasks. The model is optimized for token efficiency, balancing performance with lower computational cost. It is designed for real-world applications that require both reasoning and perception. Xiaomi has open-sourced the model, making it accessible for developers and researchers. By combining multimodality, scalability, and efficiency, MiMo-V2.5 pushes forward the development of advanced AI systems.

GPT-6 is an upcoming OpenAI model and the expected next major step beyond the GPT-5.x generation. OpenAI has not yet announced GPT-6 as a generally available product, and public documentation does not currently include GPT-6 pricing, benchmarks, model cards, API access, context length, modality details, or release timing. The latest official OpenAI model materials instead focus on GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, with Sol positioned as the flagship model for complex reasoning and coding. GPT-6 should therefore be described as a forthcoming model rather than a current production option. If it follows OpenAI’s current roadmap direction, GPT-6 will likely improve performance across reasoning, software engineering, scientific work, enterprise workflows, multimodal tasks, and AI agents. It may also expand capabilities around tool use, computer use, file search, web search, long-context work, structured outputs, and high-reliability automation. For businesses, GPT-6 could eventually become a foundation for customer support agents, internal copilots, coding systems, data analysis workflows, research assistants, and complex knowledge-work automation. Developers should continue using officially documented OpenAI models until GPT-6 is formally released. By positioning GPT-6 as an upcoming model, organizations can discuss the future of OpenAI’s model family without overstating what is currently public.