AI leaderboard · Creative writing

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.

Top score
1520Claude Opus 5.5 (High) from Anthropic
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.

LMArena scores of 51 AI models, with their 95% intervals, votes and list prices
#ModelScoreVotesPer 1M tokens, in / out
1Claude Opus 5.5 (High)Anthropic152095% interval 1506 to 15342,241·
1Gemini 4 Argon (High)Google151695% interval 1496 to 15351,055·
1Claude Fable 5 (High)Anthropic150195% interval 1494 to 15089,368·
1Claude Opus 4.6 (High)Anthropic150095% interval 1494 to 150615,218·
1Muse Wonder (Max)Meta149095% interval 1472 to 15091,146·
2Gemini 3.7 Flash (High)Google149195% interval 1482 to 14996,466·
2Claude Fable 5.1 (Max)Anthropic148695% interval 1475 to 14973,551·
3Claude Opus 4.7 (High)Anthropic148995% interval 1482 to 149611,816·
5Gemini 3 ProGoogle148595% interval 1477 to 14936,543·
5Gemini 3.8 Flash (High)Google148495% interval 1476 to 14929,182·
5Claude Opus 4.7Anthropic148295% interval 1476 to 148912,024·
5Gemini 3.1 Pro PreviewGoogle148195% interval 1476 to 148624,045·
5Claude Opus 4.6Anthropic147895% interval 1472 to 148415,439·
7Claude Opus 5 (Max)Anthropic147395% interval 1465 to 14817,695·
7Gemini 3.6 Flash (High)Google147195% interval 1463 to 14797,574·
7Claude Opus 5 (High)Anthropic147195% interval 1465 to 147815,471·
7Claude Opus 4.5 (High, 32K, 20251101)Anthropic147095% interval 1461 to 14785,696·
7Claude Sonnet 5.5 (xHigh)Anthropic146595% interval 1450 to 14801,838·
7Muse SparkMeta146495% interval 1451 to 14782,048·
8GPT-5.6 Sol (xHigh)OpenAI146995% interval 1461 to 14778,740·
9Gemini 3.5 Flash (Medium)Google146895% interval 1461 to 14769,462·
9Qwen3.8-MaxAlibaba146795% interval 1458 to 14765,879·
11Claude Opus 4.8 (High)Anthropic146995% interval 1462 to 147612,792·
12Grok 4.20 Beta 1xAI146495% interval 1454 to 14734,184·
12Muse Spark 1.3 (Max)Meta146295% interval 1452 to 14724,272·

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