Epoch AI measures how fast the cost of a given level of AI performance is falling across five benchmarks covering math, science and games of skill: about 47% per quarter, or 13x per year, since 2023, faster than electricity, compute, batteries or DNA sequencing ever fell.
Opus 4.8 (may 2026), by far best model at the time, gets equaled by deepseek 4 pro (july 31) and 4.1 flash (sept 10th) at less than 1/100th the cost. MiMo 2.6 pro (sept 21) is even cheaper and beats opus 4.8 scores by a wide margin. sonnet 4.6 max to gpt luna high is also a 99% cost drop in a short time for lower performance level models.
Even in their tests, there are big drops in 2026 models, and recent ones.
A much more comprehensive and easy test is to follow this benchmark suite (AAi). Its a mix of medium/hard benchmarks, with bias for agentic coding. (sorry for url dump) https://artificialanalysis.ai/?endpoints=openai_gpt-5-2-codex%2Cazure_kimi-k2-thinking%2Camazon-bedrock_qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct%2Camazon-bedrock_qwen3-coder-30b-a3b-instruct%2Ctogetherai_minimax-m2-5_fp4%2Ctogetherai_glm-5_fp4%2Ctogetherai_qwen3-next-80b-a3b-reasoning%2Cgoogle_gemini-3-pro_ai-studio%2Cgoogle_glm-4-7%2Cmoonshot-ai_kimi-k2-thinking_turbo%2Cnovita_glm-5_fp8&models=mimo-v2-5-pro%2Cgpt-6-sol-low%2Cgemini-3-5-flash-minimal%2Cgpt-5-6-luna-low%2Cclaude-fable-5-1-low%2Ckimi-k2-6%2Ckimi-k2-6-non-reasoning%2Cmimo-v2-0206%2Cglm-5-3-flash%2Cgpt-6-luna-xhigh%2Cglm-4.5%2Cgpt-5-5%2Cclaude-opus-5-low%2Cmimo-v2-5-0424%2Cclaude-sonnet-5%2Cmimo-v2-6-pro%2Cclaude-opus-4-5-thinking%2Cminimax-m3%2Cgpt-6-astra%2Cclaude-opus-5-5%2Cqwen3-8-27b-non-reasoning%2Cgpt-6-luna-medium%2Cclaude-fable-5-1%2Cgpt-5-6-luna%2Cmimo-v2-5-pro-non-reasoning%2Cminimax-m2-7%2Ck2-horizon-mova-36b-a4b%2Cclaude-opus-4-6-adaptive%2Cgpt-5-6-luna-medium%2Cgemini-3-1-flash-lite-preview%2Cgpt-5-4-pro%2Cgrok-4-3-medium%2Cnvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b%2Cgpt-6-luna-non-reasoning%2Cqwen3-8-27b-medium%2Cgpt-5-5-medium%2Cdeepseek-v4-pro-0424-non-reasoning%2Cgpt-6-luna%2Cgemini-3-8-flash-medium%2Cnvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning%2Cgrok-4-5%2Cgemini-3-flash-reasoning%2Cgpt-6-luna-high%2Cqwen3-8-27b-low%2Cmimo-v2-flash%2Cdeepseek-v4-pro%2Cqwen3-6-35b-a3b%2Cgemini-3-8-flash%2Cclaude-4-5-sonnet-thinking%2Cllama-4-maverick%2Cgrok-4-3%2Cclaude-opus-4-8%2Cmuse-spark-1-3%2Cqwen3-8-flash-next%2Cgpt-6-astra-low%2Ckimi-k2-5%2Cgpt-5-4%2Cqwen3-8-27b%2Cqwen3-8-max%2Cgpt-5-5-high%2Cclaude-sonnet-5-5%2Chy3%2Cclaude-opus-5%2Cgpt-5-4-mini%2Ck2-horizon-375b-a23b%2Cgemini-3-1-pro-preview%2Cgpt-6-luna-low%2Cgpt-6-sol%2Cgrok-4-6%2Cclaude-4-1-opus-thinking%2Cglm-5-3%2Cgpt-6-sol-non-reasoning%2Cclaude-sonnet-5-non-reasoning%2Cgpt-5-6-sol%2Cgpt-5-6-sol-xhigh%2Cdeepseek-v4-1-flash%2Cgemini-3-7-flash-low%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-xhigh%2Cclaude-sonnet-4-6-adaptive%2Cglm-5-2-non-reasoning%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-medium%2Cgpt-oss-120b%2Cclaude-opus-5-5-high%2Cglm-5-2%2Ckimi-k3%2Cgrok-4-3-low%2Cdeepseek-v4-flash%2Cclaude-opus-5-medium%2Cgemini-4-argon&agents=claude-code-fable-5-1-max-with-fallback%2Ckimi-code-cli-kimi-k3%2Cgrok-build-grok-4-7-xhigh%2Cmuse-code-muse-spark-1-3-max%2Cantigravity-sdk-gemini-3-8-flash-high%2Cdevin-fusion-cli-gpt-6-astra-xhigh-swe-2-medium%2Cclaude-code-qwen3-8-max%2Cdevin-fusion-cli-claude-fable-5-1-xhigh-swe-2-medium%2Ccodex-gpt-5-6-sol-max-reasoning-effort-max%2Cclaude-code-opus-5-max%2Ccodex-gpt-6-astra-max-reasoning-effort-max%2Copencode-glm-5-3-reasoning-effort-max%2Cgrok-build-grok-4-6-xhigh%2Ccodex-deepseek-v4-pro-0813-max%2Ccodex-deepseek-v4-flash-0731-max%2Cmuse-code-muse-spark-1-3-xhigh&coding-agents=cost&model-creators=zai%2Cgoogle%2Calibaba%2Copenai%2Canthropic%2Cxai%2Cmeta%2Cmistral%2Cdeepseek%2Cstepfun%2Cthinking-machines%2Ckimi%2Cifm%2Cminimax%2Cxiaomi&releases=claude-opus-5-5%2Cclaude-fable-5-1%2Cgpt-6-astra%2Cgpt-5-6-luna%2Cmuse-spark-1-3%2Cgrok-4-7%2Cmimo-v2-6-pro%2Cglm-5-3%2Cgemini-3-8-flash%2Cdeepseek-v4-1-flash%2Cminimax-m3&capability-models=gemini-3-5-flash-lite%2Cstep-5%2Cinkling%2Cmimo-v2-6-flash%2Cglm-5-3-flash%2Cmimo-v2-6-pro%2Cminimax-m3%2Cgpt-6-astra%2Cclaude-opus-5-5%2Cclaude-fable-5-1%2Cgpt-5-6-luna%2Cmuse-glimmer%2Cgrok-4-7%2Cnvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b%2Cgpt-6-luna%2Cgemini-3-8-flash%2Cmuse-spark-1-3%2Cqwen3-8-27b%2Cqwen3-8-max%2Cclaude-sonnet-5-5%2Cclaude-opus-5%2Ck2-horizon-375b-a23b%2Cgpt-6-sol%2Cglm-5-3%2Cgpt-5-6-sol%2Cdeepseek-v4-1-flash%2Cmistral-medium-3-5%2Ckimi-k3%2Cqwen3-8-flash-next&cost=evaluation-breakdown
Opus 4.8 (may 2026), by far best model at the time, gets equaled by deepseek 4 pro (july 31) and 4.1 flash (sept 10th) at less than 1/100th the cost. MiMo 2.6 pro (sept 21) is even cheaper and beats opus 4.8 scores by a wide margin. sonnet 4.6 max to gpt luna high is also a 99% cost drop in a short time for lower performance level models.