Free AI models this week: 21 Sept 2026 – 27 Sept 2026

This report is generated automatically from the public Arena leaderboard history. It covers open-weight models only.

Chat

New free models this week:

• mimo-v2.6-pro: score 1491, #1 among free models
• deepseek-v4.1-flash-max: score 1465, #7 among free models
• mimo-v2.6-flash: score 1459, #9 among free models

Biggest moves among the top 30 free models:

• nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b-nvfp4 down 5 to #16 (score 1444)
• glm-4.6 down 5 to #21 (score 1440)
• kimi-k2.5-thinking down 4 to #13 (score 1445)

Coding

New free models this week:

• mimo-v2.6-pro: score 1618, #6 among free models

Biggest moves among the top 30 free models:

• glm-5 down 3 to #23 (score 1434)
• qwen3.8-27b down 2 to #9 (score 1591)
• hy3 down 2 to #13 (score 1509)

Image

New free models this week:

• qwen-image-2.1: score 1228, #1 among free models

Biggest moves among the top 30 free models:

• ideogram-4.0-quality down 1 to #2 (score 1205)
• Cosmos3-Super-Text2Image (Agentic) down 1 to #3 (score 1165)
• Cosmos3-Super-Text2Image down 1 to #4 (score 1152)

Image edit

New free models this week:

• qwen-image-2.1: score 1367, #1 among free models

Biggest moves among the top 30 free models:

• hunyuan-image-3.0-instruct down 1 to #2 (score 1302)
• qwen-image-edit down 1 to #3 (score 1241)
• qwen-image-edit-2511 down 1 to #4 (score 1235)

Best free model in each category