State of AI Report 2026 lands: frontier is now a three-lab race between Anthropic, OpenAI and Google
nathanbenaich · x · 2026-10-23
Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) released the 9th annual State of AI Report (244 slides) and discussed it on Citi's Research podcast with Heath Terry.
- The frontier is a three-lab race: Anthropic leads Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index while Google tops Arena's human-preference ranking, "for now."
- Reasoning at scale: since OpenAI's o-series, the amount of real work the author can delegate to agents keeps growing.
- Coverage spans RSI, open vs frontier models, compute constraints, enterprise adoption, and financing.
- The report grades past predictions, including NVIDIA's failed Arm acquisition and an open model surpassing OpenAI's o1 (later fulfilled by DeepSeek-R1).
Related event: Annual State of AI Report Frames Frontier as Three-Way Race(2 posts)→
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