Weekly report · 18 Oct 2026
Free AI models this week: 12 Oct 2026 – 18 Oct 2026
8 new free models on Arena and the best free model in each category, for the week ending 18 Oct 2026.
This report is generated automatically from the public Arena leaderboard history. It covers open-weight models only.
Chat
New free models this week:
- Kimi K3 (Max): score 1475, #2 among free models
- nvidia-nemotron-3.5-super-vl-120b-a12b-nvfp4: score 1409, #52 among free models
Biggest moves among the top 30 free models:
- qwen3.5-397b-a17b up 1 to #21 (score 1438)
- hy3 down 1 to #22 (score 1438)
Coding
New free models this week:
- Kimi K3 (Max): score 1655, #1 among free models
- MiMo-V2.6-Flash: score 1634, #2 among free models
- Hy4 preview: score 1631, #3 among free models
- Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: score 1630, #4 among free models
- MiMo-V2.6-Pro: score 1625, #5 among free models
- GLM-5.3 (Max): score 1621, #6 among free models
Best free model in each category
| Category | Model | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Chat | mimo-v2.6-pro | 1491 |
| Coding | Kimi K3 (Max) | 1655 |
| Vision | glm-5.3-flash | 1296 |
| Image | qwen-image-2.1 | 1223 |
| Video | minimax-h3 | 1460 |
| Image edit | qwen-image-2.1 | 1369 |