Best AI models for research
Research workloads reward big context windows, retrieval fidelity, and reasoning. Price-per-token also matters when you're processing corpora.
The podium
Top 3 picks
🥇Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6Sonnet strikes back. The price-performance sweet spot.
reasoning
9.0
value
9.0
writing
9.0
1M context$3.00 / $15.00
🥈DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3Open-weights reasoning at bargain pricing.
reasoning
9.0
value
10.0
writing
7.0
128K context$0.27 / $1.10
Full ranking
Runners-up
| # | Model | Context | Price /M | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | Claude Opus 4.7 Anthropic | 1M | $15.00 / $75.00 | View → |
| 5 | GPT-5 Mini OpenAI | 200K | $0.40 / $1.60 | View → |
| 6 | Gemini 3 Pro Google | 2M | $3.50 / $14.00 | View → |
| 7 | Qwen 3 Max Alibaba | 256K | $1.20 / $4.00 | View → |
| 8 | Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic | 200K | $1.00 / $5.00 | View → |
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