AI leaderboard · Instructions

Best AI at following instructions: 417 models ranked by blind votes

Prompts with explicit instructions on format, length or content that the answer has to keep to. 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
1525Gemini 4 Argon (High) from Google
Models ranked
417
Level with the leader
4
On our price list
1
Published
20 October 2026

Level: the votes cannot separate it from the leader.

On LMArena’s Instructions board, Gemini 4 Argon (High) from Google leads with 1525 points from 1,748 blind votes, published 20 October 2026. 3 other models are statistically level with it. None of the models it ranks has an API price on our list yet.

Best AI at following instructions

Prompts with explicit instructions on format, length or content that the answer has to keep to.

LMArena scores of 51 AI models, with their 95% intervals, votes and list prices
#ModelScoreVotesPer 1M tokens, in / out
1Gemini 4 Argon (High)Google152595% interval 1511 to 15401,748·
1Claude Opus 5.5 (High)Anthropic152095% interval 1508 to 15313,298·
1Claude Opus 4.6 (High)Anthropic151195% interval 1506 to 151626,659·
1Claude Fable 5 (High)Anthropic150895% interval 1502 to 151415,293·
2Claude Fable 5.1 (Max)Anthropic150095% interval 1490 to 15094,693·
2Muse Wonder (Max)Meta149595% interval 1481 to 15091,797·
3Claude Opus 4.7 (High)Anthropic150295% interval 1497 to 150822,751·
4Claude Opus 4.6Anthropic149895% interval 1493 to 150329,280·
5Claude Opus 5 (High)Anthropic149595% interval 1490 to 150124,456·
5Claude Opus 5 (Max)Anthropic149595% interval 1488 to 150111,699·
5Claude Opus 4.7Anthropic149395% interval 1487 to 149823,310·
5GPT-5.6 Sol (xHigh)OpenAI149195% interval 1485 to 149714,557·
5Gemini 3.8 Flash (High)Google149095% interval 1484 to 149714,854·
5Claude Sonnet 5.5 (xHigh)Anthropic148795% interval 1475 to 14992,756·
5GPT-6.1 Sol (Max)OpenAI148495% interval 1471 to 14972,278·
6Claude Opus 4.8 (High)Anthropic149195% interval 1486 to 149622,656·
6Kimi K3 (Max)Moonshot AI · open weights149095% interval 1483 to 149611,432·
7Gemini 3.7 Flash (High)Google148695% interval 1479 to 149310,486·
7Muse Spark 1.3 (Max)Meta148495% interval 1477 to 14926,905·
8Claude Opus 4.5 (High, 32K, 20251101)Anthropic148395% interval 1477 to 14909,886·
11MiMo-V2.6-ProXiaomi · open weights147295% interval 1456 to 14871,391·
12GLM-5.3 (Max)Z.ai · open weights147895% interval 1470 to 14858,022·
12DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-20260910 (Max)DeepSeek · open weights147695% interval 1467 to 14854,725·
13Gemini 3.1 Pro PreviewGoogle148095% interval 1476 to 148444,333·
15Claude Opus 4.8Anthropic147895% interval 1473 to 148323,252·

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