The most intelligent AI you can actually use right now

The frontier of AI has never been more capable, or more annoyingly out of reach. As of early July 2026, the two models everyone is tweeting about are both behind velvet ropes. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, and Luna) shipped as a limited preview for roughly 20 government-vetted organizations: no public waitlist, not in ChatGPT, sorry. Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 is invite-only through Project Glasswing. If you are a normal developer or team, you cannot touch either one today.

So what can you actually run? Good news: the model sitting at the very top of the intelligence charts just came back.

Fable 5 is back, and it is the smartest thing you can run

Claude Fable 5 was briefly pulled, then restored on July 1, and it is once again generally available on the Claude API. It is Anthropic's most capable widely released model, built for gnarly reasoning and long-horizon agentic work, with a 1M-token context window and always-on adaptive thinking. It shares its architecture with the invite-only Mythos 5, so you get frontier-class brains without the waitlist. It is live on TryAI right now.

We benchmarked it ourselves (no vendor cherry-picking)

Vendor charts are marketing. So we ran our own: a fixed prompt suite (coding, reasoning, and summarization) across every text model on TryAI, straight through our production provider path, logging real end-to-end latency, tokens, and cost. Every model returned a valid answer on 100% of runs. The interesting parts:

• Fable 5 is the smartest, and also the slowest and priciest. It landed around 5.3s median on our short-answer suite, the slowest of any frontier model we tested, and it costs roughly twice as much per reply as Opus 4.8. That is what 10 dollars in and 50 dollars out per million tokens buys you.
• Claude Opus 4.8 is the sensible default. Around 3.1s median at roughly half the per-reply cost, while still topping SWE-bench Pro at 69%. For most work, this is the smarter pick.
• GPT-5.5 is the speed demon of the frontier tier at about 2.0s median, and it is the best all-rounder thanks to native web search.
• Open weights are almost free. Grok 4.3, Qwen 3.7 Plus, and MiniMax M3 all came in at a fraction of a cent per reply, and Qwen and MiniMax were the two fastest models overall (under 2 seconds).

The moral: "best model" is a trap question. Fable 5 wins on raw capability, but you pay for it in seconds and cents. Want the receipts side by side? See our Fable 5 vs Opus 4.8 breakdown.

So which one should you actually pick?

• Hardest reasoning and long-running agents: Fable 5.
• Best default for quality, speed, and cost together: Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.5.
• Cheapest and fastest: Qwen 3.7 Plus, MiniMax M3, or Grok 4.3.

You do not have to guess. On TryAI you can fire the same prompt at all of them on one account and pay only for what you use. Browse every model or start free and settle it yourself.