This week's chart shows data from Artificial Analysis and what is potentially the reopening of the frontier race. Through early 2026, OpenAI and Anthropic appeared to be pulling away. Their models dominated coding agents and difficult professional work, while their products accumulated usage data, tooling and developer adoption.
xAI and Meta looked increasingly unlikely to close that gap. xAI had lost senior staff, cut teams after disappointing coding performance and struggled to convert Grok’s visibility into enterprise adoption. Meta’s position looked worse. Llama 4 had disappointed, its successor was delayed after underperforming internally, and executives reportedly considered licensing Gemini while Meta rebuilt its model programme. As we covered last week, Meta seemed to be admitting defeat.
But another week and more model releases, and things look a little different. Grok 4.5 is within six points of the leader, with particularly strong terminal and agent performance. It ships under the SpaceXAI name now, xAI having been folded into SpaceX earlier this year. Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 sits nine points behind and leads some legal, tax and medical evaluations. Meta achieved this after rebuilding its architecture, data, optimisation and inference stack inside its new Superintelligence Labs.
OpenAI and Anthropic still have stronger products and developer ecosystems, but their apparent lead may prove less durable than expected. Frontier methods may now diffuse faster than product advantage, reopening a contest that recently looked settled.