Which LLM leads right now, which top spots are ties, and the best open and cheapest picks by task. Notes on the latest Arena Text snapshot, updated daily.

#ScoreVotesPriceContext

Ranking notes · read before you pick a model

What this LLM leaderboard says right now

The wall above ranks text models by human preference votes. These notes turn the same snapshot into the questions people actually ask: who really leads, which gaps are noise, and what to use for a specific task.

Snapshot: 2026-10-22 · Source: Arena public dataset · Independent notes, not the official LMArena leaderboard

Who leads, and is the lead real?

Gemini 4 Argon (High) (google) is first with 1,517, 8.4 points ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 (High). On Arena's rating scale that gap means the leader would be preferred in about 51.2% of head-to-head votes, not every time.

2 models' confidence intervals overlap the leader's, so treat the top 3 as a statistical tie rather than a strict order.

How crowded is the top 10?

The top 10 spans 22 rating points from 3 organizations. The tenth model would still be preferred over the leader in roughly 46.9% of votes, so for everyday chat the difference inside the top 10 is smaller than the rank numbers suggest.

Every top-10 model has at least 5,000 votes, so these positions are reasonably settled.

Best open-weights and cheapest strong pick

The highest open-weights model is Kimi K3 (Max) at position 18, 30 points behind the leader. See the open-source ladder.

Among top-10 models with listed API prices, Gemini 3.8 Flash (High) is the cheapest at $0.75 input and $3.75 output per million tokens (models.dev).

How to read a vote-based ranking

Arena Text scores come from people comparing two anonymous answers and picking the better one, with style control so longer or more heavily formatted answers do not win just for their looks. It is a preference signal, not an accuracy test, and it says nothing about price, speed or privacy.

Use it to shortlist two or three models, then try them on your own prompts. For a specific job, the task ladders below are a better guide than this general one.

Best LLM by task in this snapshot

  • Everyday text and chat: Gemini 4 Argon (High) (Arena Text votes)
  • Coding: Gemini 4 Argon (High) (Arena Text coding votes) · full ladder
  • Creative writing: Claude Opus 5.5 (High) (Arena writing votes) · full ladder
  • Agents and tool use: Claude Opus 5.5 (Max) (Arena Agent IPS) · full ladder
  • Image generation: GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst (Arena text-to-image votes) · full ladder
  • Image to video: MiniMax H3 (Arena image-to-video votes) · full ladder

These notes are generated from the same snapshot as the wall and refresh with every daily rebuild.