AI model releases, month by month
A dated record of every AI model release we can verify against the lab that shipped it, grouped by the month it happened. 27 releases so far, each with the price it launched at, the context window, whether the weights are open, and a link to the announcement. For what these models cost today and what is expected next, see themodel tracker; for how they rank on independent benchmarks, thevalue leaderboard.
How many AI models were released in August 2026?
6 distinct model releases in August 2026 are verifiable against a dated source, from 5 labs. 2 shipped with open weights. The flagship launches were GLM-5.3, Gemini 3.7 Flash, Grok 4.6, Muse Glimmer, Qwen3.8-Max. That number is smaller than the counts on auto-ingested catalogs, which list every fine-tune and re-hosted variant; counted here is a distinct model a lab announced as a release.
What is the most recent AI model release?
GLM-5.3 from Zhipu, released Aug 14, 2026. Same base model as GLM-5.2 with every gain from scaled post-training. Terminal-Bench 3.0 jumps 4.6 to 28.3. Weights held back about two weeks for safety work. It launched at — per million tokens.
| Day of August 2026 | Releases | Models |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 1 | Qwen3.8-Max |
| 5 | 1 | Muse Spark 1.2 |
| 10 | 1 | Muse Glimmer |
| 12 | 1 | Grok 4.6 |
| 13 | 1 | Gemini 3.7 Flash |
| 14 | 1 | GLM-5.3 |
Releases do not arrive evenly. August 2026 produced 6 of them across just 6 separate days, and 1 of those landed on August 14 alone. The pattern is competitive rather than coincidental: labs hold a launch until a rival moves, then answer within hours, which is why the calendar above is a run of spikes separated by quiet weeks rather than a steady drip.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | $3.75 |
| Muse Spark 1.2 | $4.25 |
| Grok 4.6 | $6 |
| Qwen3.8-Max | $6 |
The spread inside one month is about 2x, from Gemini 3.7 Flash at $3.75 per million output tokens to Qwen3.8-Max at $6. Read that as a range of positions, not a quality ranking: the cheapest per-token model is frequently not the cheapest way to finish a task, because a model that reasons for four times as many tokens erases a four-times-lower rate. The cost-per-task ranking works the figure the other way round, from a completed task backwards.
Why do AI release trackers disagree on dates?
Because most of them ingest an API catalog instead of reading an announcement, so they record when a model appeared in a listing rather than when the lab shipped it. Two live examples from August 2026 alone. Grok STT 1.0 is dated July 23, 2026 on one major timeline; xAI actually released it on March 16, 2026, and July 23 is the day it was added to OpenRouter. Kimi K3 is dated July 14 by one tracker and July 16 by two others; Moonshot unveiled it on July 16. Every date below is read off the lab announcement, and the 7 rows that rest on reporting are marked as such.
AI models released in August 2026
6 releases from 5 labs.
| Date | Model | Launch pricein / out per Mtok | Context | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 14 | GLM-5.3ZhipuSame base model as GLM-5.2 with every gain from scaled post-training. Terminal-Bench 3.0 jumps 4.6 to 28.3. Weights held back about two weeks for safety work. | — | 1.05M | Reporting |
| Aug 13 | Gemini 3.7 FlashGoogleLaunched at an introductory $0.75/$3.75 that Google states doubles on 1 January 2027, with DeepSWE v1.1 up to 65.3% from 3.6 Flash 49.0%. | $0.75 / $3.75 | — | Official |
| Aug 12 | Grok 4.6xAIArrived 35 days after Grok 4.5 at the same $2/$6, but with cached input raised from $0.30 to $0.50 per Mtok. Ties GPT-5.6 Sol at 61 on the AA index. | $2 / $6 | 500K | Official |
| Aug 10 | Muse GlimmerMeta · open weight (Apache 2.0)Meta returns to a plain Apache 2.0 licence with a 29.6B dense multimodal model that fits one consumer GPU at 4-bit. Built for local agents, not the leaderboard. | — | 131K | Reporting |
| Aug 5 | Muse Spark 1.2MetaMeta holds the 1.1 rate of $1.25/$4.25 and adds a $0.10/$0.20 contributor tier, plus Muse Code, a terminal coding agent, in beta. | $1.25 / $4.25 | 1M | Reporting |
| Aug 3 | Qwen3.8-MaxAlibaba · open weight (qwen3.8-max (custom, revenue-gated))The first Max-class Qwen with published weights (13 August) and, at AA 58, the highest-scoring open-weights model. The licence is custom, not Apache 2.0. | $2 / $6 | 262K | Official |
AI models released in July 2026
21 releases from 14 labs.
| Date | Model | Launch pricein / out per Mtok | Context | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 31 | DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731DeepSeekA re-post-trained V4 Flash at the same $0.14/$0.28 price, scoring 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 6 points above the pricier V4 Pro. API public beta; 0731 weights not yet posted. | $0.14 / $0.28 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 24 | Claude Opus 5AnthropicTook the top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61, and did it at half the per-token price of Claude Fable 5. | $5 / $25 | 1M | Official |
| Jul 23 | FLUX 3Black Forest LabsOne network spanning image, video, audio and robot action prediction. Video runs in early access; the open-weight Dev build is promised later in 2026. | — | — | Official |
| Jul 23 | Ling-3.0-flashAnt GroupA 124B mixture-of-experts firing only 5.1B parameters per token, which Ant says matches its own 1T flagship. Announced as open weight, but shipped API-only with the weights still unpublished. | — | 256K | Official |
| Jul 21 | Gemini 3.6 FlashGoogleGoogle's workhorse tier, cut to $7.50 output from the $9.00 that Gemini 3.5 Flash charged, on a claimed 17% drop in output tokens per task. | $1.5 / $7.5 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 21 | Laguna S 2.1poolside · open weight (OpenMDW-1.1)118B total and 8B active, released under OpenMDW-1.1 at $0.10 in and $0.20 out, the cheapest agentic coding model to ship in July. | $0.1 / $0.2 | 1M | Official |
| Jul 21 | Gemini 3.5 Flash CyberGoogleTuned to find and patch software vulnerabilities, and restricted to governments and trusted partners through the CodeMender pilot. | — | — | Official |
| Jul 21 | Gemini 3.5 Flash-LiteGoogleThe cheapest launch price of any July model at $0.30 in, aimed at classification, extraction and routing rather than reasoning. | $0.3 / $2.5 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 21 | Qwen-Image-3.0AlibabaClosed and invite-only at launch, with no model card, weights or published benchmarks to check the multi-panel layout claims against. | — | — | Reporting |
| Jul 20 | Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS PlusAlibabaTook first place on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech arena. Billed per character, not per token, at roughly a third of what ElevenLabs charges. | — | — | Reporting |
| Jul 20 | Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS FlashAlibabaThe real-time tier of the same text-to-speech release, covering 16 languages and 20 Chinese dialect regions, hosted only on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. | — | — | Reporting |
| Jul 19 | Qwen3.8-Max-PreviewAlibabaA 2.4T-parameter preview shown at the World AI Conference with no model card, no license and no independent benchmarks published alongside it. | — | 1M | Reporting |
| Jul 16 | Kimi K3Moonshot · open weight2.8T parameters and the highest-scoring open-weight model of the month. Weights followed on July 26, a day inside Moonshot's own deadline. | $3 / $15 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 15 | InklingThinking Machines · open weight (Apache 2.0)975B total and 41B active under Apache 2.0, the most permissive license anyone has attached to a model at that parameter scale. | $1.87 / $4.68 | 1M | Official |
| Jul 9 | GPT-5.6 SolOpenAIThe reasoning tier of the GPT-5.6 line and the most expensive output token of any July release at $30 per million. | $5 / $30 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 9 | GPT-5.6 LunaOpenAIThe high-volume tier, launched at $1 in and $6 out, the best intelligence-per-dollar OpenAI shipped in July. Cut 80% on July 30 to $0.20/$1.20, under the retired GPT-5.4 nano floor. | $1 / $6 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 9 | GPT-5.6 TerraOpenAIThe middle tier, launched at half of Sol while scoring within four points of it on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Cut 20% on July 30, 2026 to $2/$12, which is now 40% of Sol. | $2.5 / $15 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 9 | Muse Spark 1.1MetaMeta Superintelligence Labs shipped its first paid model, breaking the open-weight-only posture Meta had held since Llama. | — | 1M | Official |
| Jul 8 | Grok 4.5xAITrained on real Cursor session data and priced at $2 in and $6 out, well under half of what Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 charged at the time. | $2 / $6 | 500K | Official |
| Jul 8 | SWE-1.7CognitionPost-trained on top of Moonshot's already RL-heavy Kimi K2.7 Code, and served inside Devin only. Not sold as a standalone API. | — | — | Official |
| Jul 7 | Cohere Transcribe ArabicCohere · open weight (Apache 2.0)A 2B open-weight speech recognition model built for Arabic dialect variation and Arabic-English code-switching. | — | — | Official |
Filter every tracked release
Search by model, lab or description, then narrow by category or lab. Price is the rate the model launched at, not necessarily what it costs today.
| Released | Model | Launch pricein / out per Mtok | AA Index | Context | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 14, 2026 | GLM-5.3 Zhipu Same base model as GLM-5.2 with every gain from scaled post-training. Terminal-Bench 3.0 jumps 4.6 to 28.3. Weights held back about two weeks for safety work. | — | — | 1.05M | Reporting |
| Aug 13, 2026 | Gemini 3.7 Flash Google Launched at an introductory $0.75/$3.75 that Google states doubles on 1 January 2027, with DeepSWE v1.1 up to 65.3% from 3.6 Flash 49.0%. | $0.75 / $3.75 | 56 | — | Official |
| Aug 12, 2026 | Grok 4.6 xAI Arrived 35 days after Grok 4.5 at the same $2/$6, but with cached input raised from $0.30 to $0.50 per Mtok. Ties GPT-5.6 Sol at 61 on the AA index. | $2 / $6 | 61 | 500K | Official |
| Aug 10, 2026 | Muse Glimmer Meta· open weight(Apache 2.0) Meta returns to a plain Apache 2.0 licence with a 29.6B dense multimodal model that fits one consumer GPU at 4-bit. Built for local agents, not the leaderboard. | — | 35 | 131K | Reporting |
| Aug 5, 2026 | Muse Spark 1.2 Meta Meta holds the 1.1 rate of $1.25/$4.25 and adds a $0.10/$0.20 contributor tier, plus Muse Code, a terminal coding agent, in beta. | $1.25 / $4.25 | 57 | 1M | Reporting |
| Aug 3, 2026 | Qwen3.8-Max Alibaba· open weight(qwen3.8-max (custom, revenue-gated)) The first Max-class Qwen with published weights (13 August) and, at AA 58, the highest-scoring open-weights model. The licence is custom, not Apache 2.0. | $2 / $6 | 58 | 262K | Official |
| Jul 31, 2026 | DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 DeepSeek A re-post-trained V4 Flash at the same $0.14/$0.28 price, scoring 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 6 points above the pricier V4 Pro. API public beta; 0731 weights not yet posted. | $0.14 / $0.28 | 50 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 24, 2026 | Claude Opus 5 Anthropic Took the top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61, and did it at half the per-token price of Claude Fable 5. | $5 / $25 | 61 | 1M | Official |
| Jul 23, 2026 | FLUX 3 Black Forest Labs One network spanning image, video, audio and robot action prediction. Video runs in early access; the open-weight Dev build is promised later in 2026. | — | — | — | Official |
| Jul 23, 2026 | Ling-3.0-flash Ant Group A 124B mixture-of-experts firing only 5.1B parameters per token, which Ant says matches its own 1T flagship. Announced as open weight, but shipped API-only with the weights still unpublished. | — | — | 256K | Official |
| Jul 21, 2026 | Gemini 3.6 Flash Google Google's workhorse tier, cut to $7.50 output from the $9.00 that Gemini 3.5 Flash charged, on a claimed 17% drop in output tokens per task. | $1.5 / $7.5 | — | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 21, 2026 | Laguna S 2.1 poolside· open weight(OpenMDW-1.1) 118B total and 8B active, released under OpenMDW-1.1 at $0.10 in and $0.20 out, the cheapest agentic coding model to ship in July. | $0.1 / $0.2 | — | 1M | Official |
| Jul 21, 2026 | Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber Google Tuned to find and patch software vulnerabilities, and restricted to governments and trusted partners through the CodeMender pilot. | — | — | — | Official |
| Jul 21, 2026 | Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite Google The cheapest launch price of any July model at $0.30 in, aimed at classification, extraction and routing rather than reasoning. | $0.3 / $2.5 | — | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 21, 2026 | Qwen-Image-3.0 Alibaba Closed and invite-only at launch, with no model card, weights or published benchmarks to check the multi-panel layout claims against. | — | — | — | Reporting |
| Jul 20, 2026 | Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Plus Alibaba Took first place on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech arena. Billed per character, not per token, at roughly a third of what ElevenLabs charges. | — | — | — | Reporting |
| Jul 20, 2026 | Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Flash Alibaba The real-time tier of the same text-to-speech release, covering 16 languages and 20 Chinese dialect regions, hosted only on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. | — | — | — | Reporting |
| Jul 19, 2026 | Qwen3.8-Max-Preview Alibaba A 2.4T-parameter preview shown at the World AI Conference with no model card, no license and no independent benchmarks published alongside it. | — | — | 1M | Reporting |
| Jul 16, 2026 | Kimi K3 Moonshot· open weight 2.8T parameters and the highest-scoring open-weight model of the month. Weights followed on July 26, a day inside Moonshot's own deadline. | $3 / $15 | 57 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 15, 2026 | Inkling Thinking Machines· open weight(Apache 2.0) 975B total and 41B active under Apache 2.0, the most permissive license anyone has attached to a model at that parameter scale. | $1.87 / $4.68 | 41 | 1M | Official |
| Jul 9, 2026 | GPT-5.6 Sol OpenAI The reasoning tier of the GPT-5.6 line and the most expensive output token of any July release at $30 per million. | $5 / $30 | 59 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 9, 2026 | GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI The high-volume tier, launched at $1 in and $6 out, the best intelligence-per-dollar OpenAI shipped in July. Cut 80% on July 30 to $0.20/$1.20, under the retired GPT-5.4 nano floor. | $1 / $6 | 51 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 9, 2026 | GPT-5.6 Terra OpenAI The middle tier, launched at half of Sol while scoring within four points of it on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Cut 20% on July 30, 2026 to $2/$12, which is now 40% of Sol. | $2.5 / $15 | 55 | 1.05M | Official |
| Jul 9, 2026 | Muse Spark 1.1 Meta Meta Superintelligence Labs shipped its first paid model, breaking the open-weight-only posture Meta had held since Llama. | — | — | 1M | Official |
| Jul 8, 2026 | Grok 4.5 xAI Trained on real Cursor session data and priced at $2 in and $6 out, well under half of what Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 charged at the time. | $2 / $6 | 54 | 500K | Official |
| Jul 8, 2026 | SWE-1.7 Cognition Post-trained on top of Moonshot's already RL-heavy Kimi K2.7 Code, and served inside Devin only. Not sold as a standalone API. | — | — | — | Official |
| Jul 7, 2026 | Cohere Transcribe Arabic Cohere· open weight(Apache 2.0) A 2B open-weight speech recognition model built for Arabic dialect variation and Arabic-English code-switching. | — | — | — | Official |
Launch price is the standard non-batch rate the lab published on release day, in USD per million tokens. A dash means the model has no per-token rate card: speech and image models are billed per character or per generation, and some models ship only inside a product. AA Index is the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at or near launch. Source links to the lab announcement, or is marked Reporting where no primary source exists.
What the August record actually shows
Three things stand out once the month is laid out chronologically rather than as a leaderboard.
The open-weight gap closed at the top, not the bottom. 2 of 6 releases shipped with open weights, but the notable one is Kimi K3: an open-weight model scoring 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (re-read August 7, 2026), within three points of the best proprietary model released the same month. A year ago the open-weight frontier trailed by a wide margin. It now trails by a rounding error at the top and wins outright on price.
Price moved down while capability moved up. Claude Opus 5 took the top intelligence score, 63 as re-read on August 7, 2026, while charging $5 and $25 per million tokens, half of what Claude Fable 5 charges. Google cut its workhorse output rate from $9.00 to $7.50 and claims a 17% reduction in output tokens per task on top, which compounds into a real bill reduction rather than a headline one. See the model comparison tool to put any two of these against the same task.
Most of the month was not frontier models. Speech, image, video and security-tuned models made up a large share of the releases. That is the shape of a maturing market: the frontier gets a few launches a month, and the volume moves to specialised models that do one job cheaply. Several of them cannot be priced per token at all, which is why those rows carry a dash rather than a number.
For the narrative version of this month, with the benchmark detail and what it means for what you pay, read the July 2026 model roundup. For which of these you can call at no cost, see free AI models, and for what the benchmark names in each announcement actually measure, the AI benchmark directory.
Frequently asked questions
- How many AI models were released in August 2026?
- 6 model releases in August 2026 are verifiable against a dated source, from 5 different labs. That count is deliberately narrower than the auto-ingested catalogs, which list every fine-tune, quantization and re-hosted variant and run to dozens of rows a month. Counted here are distinct models a lab announced as a release: GLM-5.3, Gemini 3.7 Flash, Grok 4.6, Muse Glimmer, Qwen3.8-Max were the flagship launches, and 2 of the 6 shipped with open weights.
- What was the most recent AI model release?
- GLM-5.3 from Zhipu, released Aug 14, 2026. Same base model as GLM-5.2 with every gain from scaled post-training. Terminal-Bench 3.0 jumps 4.6 to 28.3. Weights held back about two weeks for safety work.
- Why do AI model release trackers disagree on dates?
- Because most of them ingest a catalog rather than read an announcement, so they record the date a model appeared in an API listing rather than the date the lab shipped it. Two live examples: Grok STT 1.0 is dated July 23, 2026 by one major timeline, but xAI released it on March 16, 2026 and July 23 is only when it was added to OpenRouter. Kimi K3 is dated July 14 by one tracker and July 16 by two others; Moonshot unveiled it on July 16. Every date on this page is read off the lab announcement, and the handful that are not are labelled as reporting.
- What is a launch price, and why track it separately?
- A launch price is the standard per-token rate the lab published on release day. It is worth freezing because per-token rates move: a model repriced downward six months later looks cheap in a current price table, which hides how the market actually shifted. Holding the launch price next to the current rate is how you see the drift. No other release tracker records it.
- Which lab shipped the most models in August 2026?
- Meta, with 2. The full split: Meta 2, Alibaba 1, Google 1, xAI 1, Zhipu 1. Volume is not quality: a three-model drop in one announcement is one product decision, not three independent launches.
- How much did AI model prices vary at launch?
- By about 2x within a single month. In August 2026 the cheapest launch output rate was $3.75 per million tokens (Gemini 3.7 Flash) and the most expensive was $6 (Qwen3.8-Max). Per-token price is a poor guide to what work costs, though: token consumption varies more between models than the sticker rate does.
- Where does this release data come from?
- Each row is read off the lab's own announcement, documentation or press release and stamped with the date it was checked. 20 of 27 rows are sourced that way. 7 rest on reporting because the lab published no announcement page, and those are marked as such in the table and in the JSON. Nothing is taken from memory or from another tracker.
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Sources
One primary source per release, with the date it was checked. Rows markedreporting had no citable announcement from the lab.
- Zhipu (2026). GLM-5.3. Reporting. Released Aug 14, verified Aug 14.
- Google (2026). Gemini 3.7 Flash. Announcement. Released Aug 13, verified Aug 14.
- xAI (2026). Grok 4.6. Announcement. Released Aug 12, verified Aug 14.
- Meta (2026). Muse Glimmer. Reporting. Released Aug 10, verified Aug 14.
- Meta (2026). Muse Spark 1.2. Reporting. Released Aug 5, verified Aug 14.
- Alibaba (2026). Qwen3.8-Max. Announcement. Released Aug 3, verified Aug 14.
- DeepSeek (2026). DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731. Announcement. Released Jul 31, verified Jul 31.
- Anthropic (2026). Claude Opus 5. Announcement. Released Jul 24, verified Jul 29.
- Black Forest Labs (2026). FLUX 3. Announcement. Released Jul 23, verified Jul 29.
- Ant Group (2026). Ling-3.0-flash. Announcement. Released Jul 23, verified Jul 29.
- Google (2026). Gemini 3.6 Flash. Announcement. Released Jul 21, verified Jul 29.
- poolside (2026). Laguna S 2.1. Announcement. Released Jul 21, verified Jul 29.
- Google (2026). Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber. Announcement. Released Jul 21, verified Jul 29.
- Google (2026). Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite. Announcement. Released Jul 21, verified Jul 29.
- Alibaba (2026). Qwen-Image-3.0. Reporting. Released Jul 21, verified Jul 29.
- Alibaba (2026). Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Plus. Reporting. Released Jul 20, verified Jul 29.
- Alibaba (2026). Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS Flash. Reporting. Released Jul 20, verified Jul 29.
- Alibaba (2026). Qwen3.8-Max-Preview. Reporting. Released Jul 19, verified Jul 29.
- Moonshot (2026). Kimi K3. Announcement. Released Jul 16, verified Jul 29.
- Thinking Machines (2026). Inkling. Announcement. Released Jul 15, verified Jul 29.
- OpenAI (2026). GPT-5.6 Sol. Announcement. Released Jul 9, verified Jul 29.
- OpenAI (2026). GPT-5.6 Luna. Announcement. Released Jul 9, verified Jul 31.
- OpenAI (2026). GPT-5.6 Terra. Announcement. Released Jul 9, verified Jul 31.
- Meta (2026). Muse Spark 1.1. Announcement. Released Jul 9, verified Jul 29.
- xAI (2026). Grok 4.5. Announcement. Released Jul 8, verified Jul 29.
- Cognition (2026). SWE-1.7. Announcement. Released Jul 8, verified Jul 29.
- Cohere (2026). Cohere Transcribe Arabic. Announcement. Released Jul 7, verified Jul 29.
- Artificial Analysis (2026). Intelligence Index and model pages. artificialanalysis.ai/models. Independent benchmark composite, used for the AA Index column.