My AI Model Tier List for mid-2026

Since the US has decided, in a bout of Cold War nostalgia, to bring back the years when encryption counted as a munition (if you’re reading this in the far future when we have cheap RAM, both Fable and GPT 5.6 were, for a bit, subject to the whims of red tape), I spent a little time taking stock of what was left to us here in Europe and whether any of it actually works. I suspect I wasn’t the only one doing this over the past few weeks, but now that both Fable and Sol are “back”, I decided, as a distraction from the mild chaos at work, to sit down and tidy up my notes while they were still current. This isn’t a benchmark, and I don’t much care about anyone’s leaderboard: the existing ones are either pointless or gamed (or both), because the numbers stop meaning anything the moment you point a model at a real codebase with a real SPEC.md and real tests. So take this as a set of caricatures instead–exaggerations of the behaviours I’ve run into week after week, switching between models…