LGTM LLM Rankings: First Look — April 5, 2026
LGTM LLM Rankings: First Look — April 5, 2026
First issue. No previous day to compare against, so this is a baseline snapshot — where the leaderboards stand right now, and what's worth watching.
Arena AI: Anthropic Owns the Top
The Arena AI leaderboard (5.69M community votes, 337 models) has a clear king: claude-opus-4-6-thinking at Elo 1504, with its non-thinking variant right behind at 1499. Google's gemini-3.1-pro-preview holds third at 1494, and xAI's grok-4.20-beta1 rounds out the top four at 1491.
What stands out: the top two are both Anthropic thinking models, and the gap to third is only 10 Elo. Google's gemini-3-pro sits at #5 (1486), making this a two-horse race between Anthropic and Google for quality supremacy. OpenAI's highest entry is gpt-5.4-high at #6 (1484) — competitive but not leading.
Notable newcomers in the top 20: Bytedance's dola-seed-2.0-pro debuts at #15 (1465), and Alibaba's qwen3.5-max-preview sits at #14 (1467, marked preliminary).
OpenRouter: Qwen's Free Surge
Over on OpenRouter's weekly token rankings, MiMo-V2-Pro (Xiaomi) leads with 3.73 trillion tokens. But the real story is the debut of Qwen3.6 Plus (free) at #2 with 3.16T tokens — that's a free model eating up nearly as much volume as the paid leader. Its preview variant also enters at #3.
Grok 4.1 Fast is up 49% week-over-week, the biggest mover in the top 10. And the free tier dominance is real: three of the top four models on OpenRouter this week are free.
What to Watch
The gap between thinking and non-thinking variants is small (claude-opus-4-6-thinking vs claude-opus-4-6: 5 Elo). If you're paying for thinking tokens, you're getting marginal quality gains over the base model. That's either a testament to how good the base models have gotten, or a sign that thinking mode's advantage is shrinking.
Free models dominating OpenRouter volume suggests the market is price-sensitive in ways that leaderboard quality scores don't capture. Quality ≠ usage, and the gap between the two is widening.
See the full leaderboards at Arena AI and OpenRouter.