The Best AI Models Released in April, 2026
GPT 5.5 vs Opus 4.7 and a bunch of other surprises
April 2026 was a blowout month for AI model launches.
Most notably, we saw Anthropic release Opus 4.7 on April 16th and OpenAI release GPT 5.5 on April 23rd, each of which pushed the frontier on capabilities and claimed their respective places as the new Tier 1 frontier models and co-champions of the AI model race.
In addition, we saw two other US AI labs launch fantastic Tier 2 models:
April 8th: Meta released Muse Spark
April 17th: xAI released Grok 4.3
And we saw several Chinese labs launch excellent Tier 2 models as well:
April 7th: Z.ai released GLM 5.1
April 17th: Alibaba released Qwen 3.6
April 20th: Kimi released Kimi K2.6
April 24th: DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4-Pro
April 26th: Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.5-Pro
You’ll notice one major AI lab conspicuously absent: Google. And while they did not launch any models this month, Gemini 3.1 Pro remains a Tier 1 model in terms of intelligence and capabilities.
That brings the current AI tiers to the following.
Tier 1
GPT-5.5
Opus 4.7
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Tier 2
Kimi K2.6
MiMo V2.5 Pro
Grok 4.3
Muse Spark
Qwen3.6
DeepSeek-V4-Pro
GLM-5.1
In a follow-up post, we’ll dig into the benchmarks of the various AI models released this month and assess them on IQ, EQ, coding, math, science, and several other critical dimensions.
In the meantime you can dig into the data and view the AI model graphs on aiiq.org.
Stay tuned for more.