The best large language models (LLMs) in 2026

There are dozens of major LLMs, and hundreds that are arguably significant for some reason or other. These are 14 of the best LLMs available now. Large language models (LLMs) are what most people think of when they think of AI.

They're what you're interacting with in ChatGPT and Claude, they write the code generated by Claude Code and Codex, and they power other AI features like Google's AI answers and Apple Intelligence. If something has a chatbot , some kind of text generator or text summarization built in, or writes code or automates your computer, it almost certainly uses an LLM. LLMs have been studied in research labs since the late 2010s, but after the release of ChatGPT (which showcased the power of GPT), they burst out of the lab and into the real world.

We're now a few years into the widespread availability of LLMs, and with that, they're increasingly useful and powerful. Reasoning models that take extra time to work through hard problems, large multimodal models (LMMs) , which are able to handle other input and output modalities, like images, audio, and video, as well as text, and agentic models that can use tools and write code, are three of the biggest developments. Of course, the rapid pace of AI complicates things even more.