The Capitals.
The key players — the dominant labs and flagship models.
Claude Code
Anthropic
Terminal-native agent that consistently ranks #1 across independent benchmarks; works in terminal, IDE and browser.
Claude Cowork
Anthropic
Desktop agent for macOS and Windows that edits files, organises folders, synthesises research and runs scheduled multi-step tasks in a privacy-first sandbox.
Claude Opus 4.8
Anthropic
The current flagship (with Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5); at or near the top for complex multi-file coding and long-context technical work, and the most natural for prose.
Gemini 3.1 Pro
Leads most published reasoning benchmarks and has the cheapest output among the majors; paired with Gemini Spark for long cloud tasks.
HappyHorse
Alibaba
Currently tops the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.
Nano Banana Pro
Gemini 3 Pro Image; leads the image-arena leaderboard, with the best multilingual text rendering, free in the Gemini app.
Seedance 2.0
ByteDance
Currently tops the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.