70 AI insiders tier-list the labs: only Anthropic and OpenAI reach Frontier consensus
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-08
Frontier List surveyed 70 AI industry insiders—engineers, researchers and founders at AI data companies, lab employees (votes for own lab excluded), and startup founders/engineers—asking which tier each major AI lab belongs to. Definitions: consensus = 75%+, over half = 51–74%, leans = plurality under half, some = 20%+.
- Frontier: Anthropic and OpenAI, both with consensus.
- n-1: Google DeepMind and xAI (consensus); Meta (Muse Spark) over half n-1; Moonshot (Kimi), Zhipu (GLM), DeepSeek over half n-1 with some n-2; Thinking Machines (Inkling) leans n-1.
- n-2: Alibaba (Qwen) and Xiaomi (MiMo) lean n-2 with some n-1; ByteDance (Seed), MiniMax, Tencent (Hy) over half n-2; NVIDIA (Nemotron) leans n-2.
- n-3+: Microsoft (MAI) and Cohere over half n-3+ with some n-2; Mistral over half n-3+; Amazon (Nova) and Apple with consensus.
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