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AI labs are shipping new models nonstop. Besides being better and faster than their predecessors, every new model isn't guaranteed to be a major step change, despite how the company's PR may wax poetic about them. Model strengths really emerge in context: Where are competitor models lacking or excelling? Which models have outstanding specialties, and which are just catching up to industry standards?
Also: How we test AI at ZDNET
Our Model Release Tracker helps you make sense of where models stand relative to each other, and whether they're worth a deeper look. While we don't test every model or model update on this list, we'll always include the key elements you need to know, along with our hands-on expert test, where applicable. We also include an Expert Score for certain models. Curious about how we test AI? Check out this breakdown of our process.
Here are the biggest model releases of 2026 so far and what to know about them. We'll update this list whenever a notable new model arrives.
GPT-5.6
OpenAI | July 9, 2026
What it does: Fresh on the heels of its new voice model, OpenAI released the GPT-5.6 family, which the company said it cleared with the government a few days earlier. The family includes Sol, a new flagship model, as well as Terra, built for everyday use, and Luna, the economical choice of the three. OpenAI said Sol should optimize cost without sacrificing performance, and works with a new "ultra" setting that calls on several agents to speed up task completion.
Sol beat Fable 5, the current darling of the AI race, in adaptive and medium reasoning on UC Berkeley's Agents Last Exam benchmark. Terra and Luna also "outperform Fable 5 at around one-sixteenth the cost," OpenAI said in the release. The model family is about on par with Fable 5 in most major performance areas, though, including coding, work tasks, and general applications, but is still faster and cheaper, according to OpenAI.
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