AI api tools
11 picks we've reviewed.
Nano Banana 2 Lite
Google's fastest and cheapest Gemini image model. I ran it: a text-heavy poster came back in 4.3 seconds with both lines of type rendered perfectly — the failure mode most image models still trip on.
Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic's Sonnet-tier model — 'the best combination of speed and intelligence.' Near-frontier on coding and agentic work at roughly a third of Opus's price, with a 1M-token context and adaptive thinking on by default.
Claude Mythos
Claude Mythos is Anthropic's cybersecurity-focused, Mythos-class model — built to autonomously find and fix software vulnerabilities. Its rollout is restricted; a safeguarded public sibling, Fable 5, carries Mythos-class capability to the broader public.
GPT-5.6
OpenAI's next flagship after GPT-5 — announced June 26, 2026 as a preview and generally available since July 9, 2026 in three tiers (Sol, Terra, Luna) with published per-token pricing.
Qwen-AgentWorld
Alibaba's Qwen team open-sources AgentWorld — a language world model that simulates seven agent environments (MCP, Search, Terminal, SWE, Web, OS, Android) and is trained to predict how each environment responds to an action. Released June 24, 2026 under Apache 2.0.
Sakana Fugu
Sakana AI's multi-agent orchestration system — Fugu routes complex tasks across a network of specialized agents, all through a single model API endpoint.
GLM-5.2
Zhipu's open-weight coding flagship: a 753B mixture-of-experts model with a 1M-token context and MIT weights, claiming to edge past GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarks.
MiniMax M3
MiniMax's third-generation flagship — M3 is an open-weight 428B-parameter MoE (~23B active per token) using MiniMax Sparse Attention (MSA), with a 1M-token context window and native multimodality (text, image, and video input). It's positioned as the first open-weight model to combine frontier coding, a 1M context, and native multimodality — and can even operate a desktop computer.
Claude Opus 4.8
Anthropic's most capable Opus-tier model, built for complex agentic coding and enterprise work — a 1M-token context, adaptive thinking, and 128K max output, hosted only via the Claude API.
Kling 3.0
Kuaishou's flagship hosted video model — cinematic text- and image-to-video with native audio. I ran it: clearly a tier above the open models, with the usual fast-motion artifacts.
OpenHands
An open, self-hosted control center for autonomous coding agents — own the infrastructure, bring your own model, and run agents that edit files and ship code.