Best AI for creative writing: 415 models ranked by blind votes
Prompts that ask for stories, poems, scripts and other original writing. Ranked by LMArena’s blind votes, every score with its margin of error and, beside it, the list price of each model on our price list.
Scores from LMArena, published 20 October 2026, under CC BY 4.0. Prices from each maker’s pricing page, read on 15 October 2026.
- Models ranked
- 415
- Level with the leader
- 5
- On our price list
- 1
- Published
- 20 October 2026
Level: the votes cannot separate it from the leader.
On LMArena’s Creative writing board, Claude Opus 5.5 (High) from Anthropic leads with 1520 points from 2,241 blind votes, published 20 October 2026. 4 other models are statistically level with it. None of the models it ranks has an API price on our list yet.
Best AI for creative writing
Prompts that ask for stories, poems, scripts and other original writing.
| # | Model | Score | Votes | Per 1M tokens, in / out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Opus 5.5 (High)Anthropic | 95% interval 1506 to 1534 | 2,241 | · |
| 1 | Gemini 4 Argon (High)Google | 95% interval 1496 to 1535 | 1,055 | · |
| 1 | Claude Fable 5 (High)Anthropic | 95% interval 1494 to 1508 | 9,368 | · |
| 1 | Claude Opus 4.6 (High)Anthropic | 95% interval 1494 to 1506 | 15,218 | · |
| 1 | Muse Wonder (Max)Meta | 95% interval 1472 to 1509 | 1,146 | · |
| 2 | Gemini 3.7 Flash (High)Google | 95% interval 1482 to 1499 | 6,466 | · |
| 2 | Claude Fable 5.1 (Max)Anthropic | 95% interval 1475 to 1497 | 3,551 | · |
| 3 | Claude Opus 4.7 (High)Anthropic | 95% interval 1482 to 1496 | 11,816 | · |
| 5 | Gemini 3 ProGoogle | 95% interval 1477 to 1493 | 6,543 | · |
| 5 | Gemini 3.8 Flash (High)Google | 95% interval 1476 to 1492 | 9,182 | · |
| 5 | Claude Opus 4.7Anthropic | 95% interval 1476 to 1489 | 12,024 | · |
| 5 | Gemini 3.1 Pro PreviewGoogle | 95% interval 1476 to 1486 | 24,045 | · |
| 5 | Claude Opus 4.6Anthropic | 95% interval 1472 to 1484 | 15,439 | · |
| 7 | Claude Opus 5 (Max)Anthropic | 95% interval 1465 to 1481 | 7,695 | · |
| 7 | Gemini 3.6 Flash (High)Google | 95% interval 1463 to 1479 | 7,574 | · |
| 7 | Claude Opus 5 (High)Anthropic | 95% interval 1465 to 1478 | 15,471 | · |
| 7 | Claude Opus 4.5 (High, 32K, 20251101)Anthropic | 95% interval 1461 to 1478 | 5,696 | · |
| 7 | Claude Sonnet 5.5 (xHigh)Anthropic | 95% interval 1450 to 1480 | 1,838 | · |
| 7 | Muse SparkMeta | 95% interval 1451 to 1478 | 2,048 | · |
| 8 | GPT-5.6 Sol (xHigh)OpenAI | 95% interval 1461 to 1477 | 8,740 | · |
| 9 | Gemini 3.5 Flash (Medium)Google | 95% interval 1461 to 1476 | 9,462 | · |
| 9 | Qwen3.8-MaxAlibaba | 95% interval 1458 to 1476 | 5,879 | · |
| 11 | Claude Opus 4.8 (High)Anthropic | 95% interval 1462 to 1476 | 12,792 | · |
| 12 | Grok 4.20 Beta 1xAI | 95% interval 1454 to 1473 | 4,184 | · |
| 12 | Muse Spark 1.3 (Max)Meta | 95% interval 1452 to 1472 | 4,272 | · |
| 14 | Gemini 3.5 Flash (High)Google | 95% interval 1457 to 1472 | 9,473 | · |
| 14 | Claude Opus 4.8Anthropic | 95% interval 1456 to 1469 | 12,821 | · |
| 14 | Kimi K3 (Max)Moonshot AI · open weights | 95% interval 1455 to 1471 | 7,019 | · |
| 14 | Claude Opus 4.5 (20251101)Anthropic | 95% interval 1455 to 1468 | 11,406 | · |
| 14 | Gemini 3 FlashGoogle | 95% interval 1448 to 1466 | 4,822 | · |
| 14 | GPT-5.5 InstantOpenAI | 95% interval 1445 to 1465 | 4,350 | · |
| 14 | GPT-6.1 Sol (Max)OpenAI | 95% interval 1439 to 1470 | 1,688 | · |
| 16 | GLM-5.3 (Max)Z.ai · open weights | 95% interval 1446 to 1464 | 5,455 | · |
| 21 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 (20250929)Anthropic | 95% interval 1448 to 1460 | 12,425 | · |
| 21 | GLM-5.2 (Max)Z.ai · open weights | 95% interval 1447 to 1461 | 10,217 | · |
| 21 | Grok 4.5xAI | 95% interval 1444 to 1459 | 8,280 | · |
| 21 | GPT-6 Astra (Max)OpenAI | 95% interval 1437 to 1460 | 2,966 | · |
| 21 | DeepSeek-V4-Pro (High, 20260813)DeepSeek · open weights | 95% interval 1432 to 1460 | 1,998 | · |
| 22 | GPT-5.5 (High)OpenAI | 95% interval 1445 to 1458 | 13,147 | · |
| 23 | GLM-5Z.ai · open weights | 95% interval 1439 to 1457 | 4,859 | · |
| 24 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 (High, 32K, 20250929)Anthropic | 95% interval 1444 to 1456 | 12,706 | · |
| 24 | Claude Sonnet 4.6Anthropic | 95% interval 1443 to 1456 | 12,370 | · |
| 24 | Qwen3.5-Max-PreviewAlibaba | 95% interval 1435 to 1456 | 3,325 | · |
| 26 | GPT-5.5OpenAI | 95% interval 1441 to 1454 | 13,405 | · |
| 27 | Grok 4.20 Multi-Agent Beta (0309)xAI | 95% interval 1440 to 1454 | 11,299 | · |
| 27 | Gemini 3 Flash (Minimal)Google | 95% interval 1441 to 1453 | 15,203 | · |
| 27 | DeepSeek-V4-ProDeepSeek · open weights | 95% interval 1439 to 1454 | 9,724 | · |
| 27 | GLM-5.1Z.ai · open weights | 95% interval 1440 to 1453 | 12,579 | · |
| 27 | Claude Opus 4.1 (Thinking 16K, 20250805)Anthropic | 95% interval 1438 to 1453 | 6,868 | · |
| 28 | Grok 4.20 Beta (Reasoning, 0309)xAI | 95% interval 1439 to 1452 | 11,430 | · |
| Further down the board: the other models on our price list | ||||
| 232 | gpt-oss-120bOpenAI · open weights | 95% interval 1269 to 1289 | 3,911 | · |
Where the ranking comes from
The scores, intervals and ranks are LMArena’s. The prices are ours.
- Blind votes
- LMArena puts the same prompt to two anonymous models and asks the person who wrote it to pick the better answer. The votes place every model on one scale, where a gap of 100 points means the higher model wins about 64 times in 100.
- Style control
- The scores discount answer length and formatting, so a model does not climb by writing more or by adding headings and lists.
- Shared ranks
- A model’s rank is one plus the number of models whose whole 95% interval sits above its own. Models the votes cannot separate share a rank, which is why several can be first.
- Settings
- A model can appear more than once, at different reasoning settings: the line under its name gives the entry as LMArena lists it. Entries with web search switched on are a different product and carry no price.
- Prices
- The list price per million tokens from the maker’s own pricing page, read on 15 October 2026. It is a price per token, not per answer: a higher reasoning setting spends more tokens on the same question.
Source: LMArena, leaderboard dataset (revision 9041150e, published 20 October 2026), licensed under CC BY 4.0. We change no score: we add the prices and the links to our model pages.
What each of them costs to run
The price list works three everyday jobs on every model, and our own benchmark runs them on real business tasks to see which pass.
Scores published 20 October 2026