Claude Opus 4.6
Anthropic's most powerful model and the current leader on SWE-bench coding benchmarks with 80.8% — the strongest agentic coding model available.
Legal work demands precision above all else. The best AI for lawyers handles long documents without losing critical detail, drafts formal language correctly, and surfaces relevant precedent without hallucinating citations.
Best for research and deep document analysis — 2M context at the best premium price.
The top legal pick stays accurate on contract language, long documents, and structured formal drafting.
Strong alternatives help when you need faster turnaround on routine documents or lower cost at high volume.
The ranking favors accuracy, citation awareness, and document-length coherence over speed alone.
Choose the top pick for contract review, legal research synthesis, and high-stakes client documents.
Choose a faster alternative for intake forms, routine correspondence, and internal memos.
Choose a budget model only for admin tasks where a human will review everything before use.
2M token context window — the largest of any frontier model
Leads ARC-AGI-2 reasoning benchmark at 77.1%
Best price-to-performance among premium models at $2/$12 per 1M tokens
Slower than Flash for everyday lightweight tasks
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is better for writing quality
Strong backups depending on your budget, workload, and preferred tradeoffs.
Anthropic's most powerful model and the current leader on SWE-bench coding benchmarks with 80.8% — the strongest agentic coding model available.
The default model powering Cursor and Windsurf. 79.6% SWE-bench, 1M context window, and best-in-tier writing quality — all at $3/1M input.
Open-source reasoning model that matches o1-class performance on math, science, and complex coding at a fraction of the cost — the best open alternative to proprietary reasoning models.
OpenAI's latest flagship with unique desktop-control capabilities — it can see your screen, click, and navigate apps via the API.
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Gemini 3.1 Pro is the current top recommendation because it delivers the strongest mix of fit, output quality, and practical usefulness for this category.
DeepSeek R1 is the strongest lower-cost alternative when you want better value without dropping all the way down in usefulness.
Choose the top pick when you want the safest default. Choose an alternative when your priority shifts toward cost, speed, context window, or a more specialized workflow fit.
DeepSeek R1 is the cheapest strong alternative here if you want better value without dropping to a weak default.