State of AI Report 2026: the frontier is now a three-lab race between Anthropic, OpenAI and Google
nathanbenaich · x · 2026-10-25
Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) releases the 9th annual State of AI Report (244 slides) covering research, industry and policy. Key takeaways:
- The frontier is a three-lab race: Anthropic leads Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index; Google leads Arena's human-preference ranking, for now.
- Last year's theme of reasoning becoming useful at scale is confirmed — the author's delegable agent workload keeps growing.
- The report grades past predictions, including NVIDIA failing to acquire Arm and an open-source model surpassing OpenAI's o1 (later delivered by DeepSeek-R1).
The most widely read annual synthesis of AI progress.
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