Open-source LLMs stopped being the budget option in 2026. Kimi K3 sits level with Claude Opus 4.8 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (its hosted API is live; the weights themselves are expected by July 27), GLM-5.2 held the top open-model spot before it, and the field behind them is deep enough that the hard part is choosing.
This ranking covers the nine best open-weight models right now — on license, context window, hardware reality, and the per-token price you actually pay. Every one of them is available through LLM Gateway with one key, at each provider's published rate, so you can A/B any two of them by changing one word in a request.
1. Kimi K3 — the open frontier
Moonshot AI · 2.8T params · 1M context · $3.00 / $15.00 per M
The largest open-weight model ever announced — with one caveat: the weights are not downloadable yet. Moonshot expects to release them by July 27, 2026, and the license is still unannounced; the hosted API has been live since July 16. Ranks 4th of 189 models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — tied with Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 — and took first place in Arena's blind Frontend Code testing. Always-on reasoning, vision, tools, and output configurable up to 1M tokens. The open model to beat, priced accordingly. Full breakdown here.
