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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.
Kimi K3
Moonshot | July 16, 2026
What it does: At 2.8 trillion parameters, Kimi K3 is the largest open-source model on the market, designed for "long-horizon coding, knowledge work, and reasoning," according to Moonshot's announcement. For context, that's bigger than DeepSeek V4 Pro, from the company that first made US AI labs nervous back in January 2025, at 1.6 trillion.
Most notably, Kimi K3 topped Anthropic's Fable 5 on the Arena benchmark for front-end coding, which measures complex agentic coding tasks. That said, Moonshot itself noted that Kimi K3's overall performance doesn't top Fable 5, though the model does rival it and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 in several individual benchmarks.
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