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Q1 2026 State of AI Models — What 3 Months of Rankings Actually Tell Us

Q1 2026 State of AI Models — What 3 Months of Rankings Actually Tell Us
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Three months of weekly ranking data. Enough to separate signal from noise.

Here’s what Q1 2026 taught us about the model landscape.

The top 3 haven’t moved. Everything below them has.

Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini have held the top 3 spots for the entire quarter. Not a single week where any of them dropped below #3.

But look at spots 4 through 20 and the picture is completely different. Models have jumped 8, 10, 12 spots in a single week. The mid-tier is chaos — and that’s good. Competition at the top is locked. Competition right below it is fierce.

What this means for you: if you don’t need absolute state-of-the-art, you have more good options than ever. The “good enough” tier is expanding fast.

Open-source went from “interesting” to “actually usable”

Start of Q1: open-source models in the top 20 were a novelty. End of Q1: they’re a legitimate alternative for production workloads.

Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen all gained share across the quarter. Not in a straight line — there were dips and spikes — but the trend is unmistakable. Developers are shipping with open-source models. Not just experimenting.

Price per token dropped 22% in 3 months

I tracked the average price across the top 50 models from January to March. Down 22%.

The drivers:

  • SiliconFlow entered the market aggressively
  • Groq kept cutting prices in response
  • OpenRouter added more providers, increasing competition

At this rate, the cost of running AI inference drops by half every 12-15 months. We’re not at the “too cheap to meter” stage yet, but the curve is bending that way.

Three numbers worth remembering from Q1

  • 4.2 million — estimated total API calls across the top 10 models per day on OpenRouter
  • 68% — share of those calls going to closed-source models (down from 78% in Q4 2025)
  • $0.32 — average price per million tokens across the top 50 (down from $0.41)

What I’m watching in Q2

The open-source share number is the one to track. If it goes from 32% to 40% by mid-year, we’re watching a real shift. Not a trend piece. An actual market change.

I’ll be here every week tracking it.