AI arms race tracker
Who is shipping, who owns the news cycle, where the compute is, and what the money thinks happens next. Polymarket traders give Google 73% and Anthropic 24% to have the best AI model; Anthropic leads the news cycle with 24% of stories; labs in China make 23 of the 50 hottest open-weights models.
01Key numbers today
From issue #006, November 6, 2026.
- Best model odds
- Google 73%, Anthropic 24%, OpenAI 3.7%Polymarket: “Which company has the best AI model end of November?” ($823,250 traded). Market prices, not predictions or advice. Source
- News cycle leaders
- Anthropic 24%, OpenAI 23%, Google 11%Share of today’s 763 stories that mention each lab; merged coverage counts once.
- Open-weights race
- China 23, US 9, Europe 2, other 16Country of the lab behind the 50 hottest Hugging Face models. Leader: deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017.
- Release radar
- 33 new models in 30 daysOn OpenRouter, out of 453 listed. Newest: Google Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash. Source
- Frontier compute, 2026
- US 9.3×1026 FLOP, China 2.0×1025 FLOP, Europe 1.2×1025 FLOPLargest known training run so far this year, from Epoch AI’s 1092 notable models. Biggest recent run: GPT-6 Astra (OpenAI). Source
02The tracker
Live charts from today’s issue. Colors follow the country of the lab.
Who has the best model?
Live Polymarket odds on which company tops the leaderboard. Market prices, not predictions or advice.
Which company has the best AI model end of November? · $823k traded
Which company has best AI model end of 2026? · $4M traded
Who owns the news cycle
Share of today’s stories mentioning each lab. Merged coverage counts once.
Open-weights race
Where the 50 hottest Hugging Face models come from. Fine-tunes and quantized builds count for the base model’s lab.
- CNdeepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 5.3k
- OTHsperidlabs/idol 857
- CNmoonshotai/Kimi-K3.1-Pro 1.4k
- CNQwen/Qwen3.8-27B 19k
- CNQwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 6.8k
- USLiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B 1.5k
- CNccore/Qwen3.5-4B-3D-Coder 744
Frontier compute
Largest known training run each year, in FLOP (log scale). From Epoch AI’s 1.1k notable models.
Show as a table
| Year | US | China | Europe |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 1e21.82 | 1e19.81 | 1e21.28 |
| 2017 | 1e20.93 | – | 1e20.81 |
| 2018 | 1e21.94 | – | 1e20.23 |
| 2019 | 1e22.83 | 1e19.58 | 1e23.03 |
| 2020 | 1e23.5 | 1e21.22 | 1e21.48 |
| 2021 | 1e24.31 | 1e24.02 | 1e23.8 |
| 2022 | 1e24.44 | 1e23.55 | 1e23.76 |
| 2023 | 1e25.7 | 1e24.11 | 1e23.89 |
| 2024 | 1e25.58 | 1e25.4 | 1e22.7 |
| 2025 | 1e26.7 | 1e25.18 | – |
| 2026 | 1e26.97 | 1e25.3 | 1e25.09 |
Latest additions to Epoch’s notable-model list
- USGemini 4 Carbon · Google DeepMindOct 28
- USMAI-Base-2 · MicrosoftOct 15
- USGrok Voice 3.0 · xAIOct 14
- USMuse Wonder Full · Meta AIOct 12
- USMuse Wonder · Meta AIOct 12
- EUMistral Large 4 · Mistral AIOct 6
Release radar
33 models landed on OpenRouter in the last 30 days, out of 453 listed. Price is dollars per million tokens, input / output.
| Added | Model | Maker | Context | $ / 1M tok |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 5 | Gemini Omni 1.2 FlashGemini Omni 1.2 Flash is Google's native multimodal video generation and editing model, the successor to Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash. It generates clips up to 15 seconds long with native... | US Google | 131k | $1.5 / $9 |
| Nov 5 | Auto RouterAuto is OpenRouter’s flagship model router, built for general-purpose usage. It adapts to each request, choosing cost-optimal models and adjusting reasoning effort. It balances task difficulty,… | OTH openrouter | 2M | $-1000000 / $-1000000 |
| Nov 5 | Auto CodeAuto Code is OpenRouter’s router built specifically for coding agents and harnesses. It uses the same routing engine as the [Auto Router](https://openrouter.ai/openrouter/auto), with every request… | OTH openrouter | 2M | $-1000000 / $-1000000 |
| Nov 4 | Gemini Omni 1.1 FlashGemini Omni 1.1 Flash is Google's native multimodal video generation and editing model, the generally available successor to Gemini Omni Flash Preview. It is suited for text-to-video,… | US Google | 131k | $1.5 / $9 |
| Nov 4 | ricursiveAI/Ripple-65B-PreviewRipple-65B-Preview by ricursiveAI, a 65B model with native tool calling, served in BF16. | OTH ricursiveai | 1M | $0.2 / $0.6 |
| Nov 3 | Hy4The official release of Hy4 delivers comprehensive and substantial improvements over Hy4 Preview, with particularly strong gains in agentic capabilities and performance across a wide range of… | CN Tencent | 1M | $0.417 / $1.25 |
| Nov 2 | Crouton AlphaCrouton Alpha is a lightweight model built for scalable coding, agentic, and multimodal workflows. It's ideal for executing agentic sub-tasks, tool use, and document analysis in high-volume,… | OTH stealth | 1M | free |
| Nov 2 | GLM 5.3 FlashX LegalGLM-5.3-FlashX-Legal (GLM-Legal) is Z.ai's legal-domain variant of GLM-5.3-FlashX, a native multimodal model that accepts text, image, and video input and produces text. It adds legal-domain… | CN Z.ai | 1M | $0.37 / $1.25 |
| Oct 28 | Particle-1Particle-1 is a token-efficient agentic coding model from Particle AI, post-trained on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. It is suited for software engineering work such as terminal workflows, codebase changes,… | OTH Particle AI | 1M | $0.05 / $0.5 |
| Oct 26 | GPT-6.1 Terra ProGPT-6.1 Terra Pro is the same underlying model as [GPT-6.1 Terra](https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-6.1-terra), served with `reasoning.mode` set to `pro` for higher-quality responses on complex… | US OpenAI | 1.1M | $1 / $5 |
Biggest training runs, last 24 months
Notable models released in the last 12 months: 127.
- USGPT-6 Astra · OpenAI9.3×1026 FLOP
- USGrok 4 · xAI5.0×1026 FLOP
- USGPT-4.5 · OpenAI3.8×1026 FLOP
- USGrok 3 · xAI3.5×1026 FLOP
- USGPT-5 · OpenAI6.6×1025 FLOP
- USLlama 4 Behemoth (preview) · Meta AI5.1×1025 FLOP
- USComposer 2.5 · Cursor3.9×1025 FLOP
- USClaude 3.7 Sonnet · Anthropic3.4×1025 FLOP
What the money expects
The busiest AI prediction markets on Polymarket and their current front-runner. Market prices, not predictions or advice.
03About the data
Every morning Token Times pulls Polymarket’s AI markets, the OpenRouter model catalog, Epoch AI’s notable-models dataset and the Hugging Face trending list, and counts how often each lab appears in the day’s 763 stories. Country colors follow the headquarters of the lab; fine-tunes count for the base model’s lab.
Download today’s numbers as JSON: arms-race.json. Past days are in the issue archive.