Artificial Analysis: AI Benchmarks & Pricing

Artificial Analysis is an independent AI benchmarking site that compares models on intelligence, speed and price. The site is free; Pro is $499 a month.

Artificial Analysis was founded by Micah Hill-Smith and George Cameron and is backed by investors including Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Andrew Ng. It tests AI models, the cloud providers that serve them and the chips they run on, then publishes the results as free leaderboards. AI labs regularly quote its numbers in launch posts. We checked its homepage, pricing page, API docs and about page on October 29, 2026.

What Artificial Analysis does

• Intelligence Index: one combined score across its evaluations. Version 5 launched on October 27, 2026, and on October 28 Gemini 4 Carbon took the top spot.
• Speed and cost: output tokens per second, time to first token and cost per task for each model.
• Provider comparisons: the same model served by different clouds, so you can see who is fastest or cheapest.
• Media models: image, video, speech and music leaderboards, plus coding agents.
• Model Recommender and Optima: tools that suggest a model for your priorities or let you build a custom benchmark.
• Scale: it lists 500+ models benchmarked, 100+ inference providers and 1,000+ endpoints.

Is Artificial Analysis free?

Yes, for most people. The leaderboards, charts and model pages are free to browse with no account. There’s also a free data API with benchmark scores, speed and pricing for language and media models, rate-limited to 1,000 requests a day. You need a free account to get an API key, and you must credit artificialanalysis.ai wherever you use the data.

Artificial Analysis Pricing (2026)

Plan	Price	What you get
Free	$0	Public leaderboards and charts; free API at 1,000 requests a day
Pro	$499/month per seat ($417/month billed yearly)	Commercial API, data export, custom charts and tables, industry reports, email support
Enterprise	Custom	Highest API limits, compute market forecasts, workshops, AI strategy advisory, for 150+ employees

Yearly billing saves $984 a year on Pro. Redistributing the data or using it externally needs a separate agreement. For most readers, the free site answers the real question: which model is smartest, fastest or cheapest for my job right now.

How to use it to pick a model

Start on the LLM leaderboard and sort by the metric you care about. If you’re paying per token, compare cost per task rather than list price, because some models use many more tokens to answer. Then check the provider view: the same open model can be several times faster on one host than another. For our own take on which models win today, see the best AI model guide, and if you want to run models yourself, the best local AI models list.

Limitations

• Benchmarks aren’t your workload: a top index score doesn’t guarantee the best result on your prompts.
• Pro is pricey: $499 a month per seat is aimed at companies, not individuals.
• Some models can’t be tested: models without a public API are marked as such.
• Attribution required: free API data must credit Artificial Analysis.

New to how models are measured? Our explainer on tokens in AI helps you read the price and speed charts.

Artificial Analysis is the most useful free place to compare AI models on intelligence, speed and real cost per task.

Use the free site to shortlist models, then test the top two on your own prompts. Only teams that need exports or the commercial API need Pro.