Report · artificialanalysis.ai
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5

artificialanalysis.ai
Source published October 28, 2026
Summary: 1 min read
50/100
Summary
Artificial Analysis released Intelligence Index v5 on October 27, 2026, adding two benchmarks and revising three others so that 60% of the composite model-capability score now relies on private test sets or held-out answers. The index measures knowledge work, coding, science and general capabilities at 25% each. New evaluations include Cognition’s 132-task FrontierCode 2.0 coding benchmark and Terminal-Bench-Science, which contains 70 terminal-based scientific research tasks. Claude Opus 5.5 at maximum effort leads the overall index with 58, followed by GPT-6 Astra at 57 and GPT-6.1 Sol at 55; Gemini 4 Argon scores 50. Claude Opus 5.5 leads FrontierCode 2.0 at 46% and HLE-Diamond at 68%, while GPT-6 Astra leads Terminal-Bench-Science at 63% and the CritPt v2 hard subset at 72%. No model led all nine evaluations. Kimi K3.1 Pro, whose weights have not yet been released, is the highest-scoring open-weights model at 46, 12 points behind Claude Opus 5.5. Among models with released weights, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3 lead at 32. Artificial Analysis also launched Progress Index v1, a continuous capability scale covering language models released since November 2022.
Key Takeaways
- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 uses private test sets or held-out answers for 60% of its composite score and adds FrontierCode 2.0 and Terminal-Bench-Science.
- Claude Opus 5.5 leads Intelligence Index v5 at 58, ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 57 and GPT-6.1 Sol at 55.
- GPT-6 Astra leads Terminal-Bench-Science at 63% and the CritPt v2 hard subset at 72%, while Claude Opus 5.5 leads FrontierCode 2.0 at 46% and HLE-Diamond at 68%.
- Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 46 as the top open-weights model whose weights are not yet released; the highest models with released weights, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3, score 32.
- Among the 10 highest-scoring models shown, per-task cost ranges from $0.96 for GPT-6.1 Terra to $13.04 for Claude Fable 5.1.
What the discussion said
Commenters spent far less time celebrating a new intelligence index than interrogating the machinery behind its reshuffle. The headline result was a conspicuous drop in several open-weight models alongside modest gains or smaller losses for prominent proprietary US models, which many readers saw as too patterned to dismiss. They wanted a concrete account of which benchmark weights, scoring changes, and model removals produced the movement, especially because earlier revisions were remembered as similarly punishing open releases. The addition of unreproducible private data and the disappearance of some popular open models from charts made the ranking feel less auditable, not more authoritative. Skeptics also argued that tiny benchmark suites, saturated tasks, and composite weighted scores can turn statistical noise into decisive-looking rank changes. Several users said their own backend, UI, and agentic coding work contradicts the new ordering: some open models are faster, cheaper, and less error-prone in daily use than their index position suggests. Others offered a less conspiratorial explanation: coding-focused models may genuinely lag on broader non-coding tests, and the coding-only ranking appeared more believable. A claim that an external coding benchmark used favorable vendor-specific agents was corrected; the index runs that evaluation through its own harness. Even so, the broader demand remained simple: publish enough methodology and coverage to make dramatic revisions independently credible.
Where opinion split
The central fight is whether the new composite index exposes real weaknesses in open-weight models or rewrites the rules to preserve proprietary US models at the top. Defenders argue that narrow, gamed, or saturated benchmarks needed replacement and that broader evaluations naturally hurt coding-specialized models. Critics counter that opaque weights, private inputs, missing models, and one-sided score changes make the revision look like reverse benchmark optimization rather than neutral measurement.
Coverage & discussions
Hacker News · artificialanalysis.ai
Community discussions
Community Sentiment
Positives
- The coding-focused sub-index looks more plausible to some readers, suggesting that separating software work from vague general intelligence produces saner comparisons.
- DeepSeek Flash still earns practical loyalty for delivering usable coding quality at frontier-beating speed and cost, exactly the tradeoff broad leaderboards can hide.
- Some users find the strongest proprietary models more reliable on complex work because they reach correct answers with fewer tokens and less agentic thrashing.
Concerns
- A dramatic open-weight slide paired with proprietary gains looks engineered to many readers, because the methodology does not clearly explain what changed or why.
- Private evaluation sources make the new ranking impossible to reproduce, undermining its value as an independent measure of model intelligence.
- Removing popular open models from charts and replacing their scores with unavailable values makes the comparison set look selectively curated.
- Composite scores built from roughly a few hundred coding or science questions can amplify noise, benchmark saturation, and arbitrary weighting into fake precision.
- Reported real-world backend and interface work often favors models the index demoted, reinforcing the view that leaderboard intelligence is drifting from usable capability.
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