The API often goes first.

Every launch, with sources

• Beam11 days after
  Reflection AI
  First seen Oct 16, 13:46 UTC
  Announced Oct 5, 19:11 UTC, @reflection_ai on X
  Introduced Oct 5 with no availability; we saw it 46 min after Reflection's Oct 16 availability post.
• Gemini 413 days after
  Google
  First seen Oct 13, 15:33 UTC
  Announced Sep 30, 20:00 UTC, Google blog
  Announced Sep 30 for trusted testers only; we saw it 26 min before the Oct 13 general-availability post.
• Claude Haiku 5.510 min before
  Anthropic
  First seen Oct 7, 17:51 UTC
  Announced Oct 7, 18:01 UTC, @claudeai on X
• Mistral Large 41 h 36 min after
  Mistral
  First seen Oct 6, 13:36 UTC
  Announced Oct 6, 12:00 UTC, Mistral blog
  A public preview. We saw it 30 min after Mistral's post on X, which followed the blog.
• Ling 3.1 Flash1 h 48 min after
  Ant Group
  First seen Sep 30, 18:21 UTC
  Announced Sep 30, 16:33 UTC, @AntLingAGI on X
• GPT-6.1 Sol3 min before*
  OpenAI
  First seen Sep 29, 17:23 UTC
  Announced Sep 29, 17:26 UTC, @OpenAI on X
  * Not counted: OpenAI introduced it during a DevDay livestream that began before this post (it linked the stream at 16:47 UTC), so the post may not be the first announcement.
• Claude Sonnet 5.59 min before
  Anthropic
  First seen Sep 28, 17:54 UTC
  Announced Sep 28, 18:03 UTC, @claudeai on X
• Claude Opus 5.56 min before
  Anthropic
  First seen Sep 22, 16:24 UTC
  Announced Sep 22, 16:31 UTC, @claudeai on X
• Mercury 2.513 h 56 min after
  Inception
  First seen Sep 9, 06:41 UTC
  Announced Sep 8, 16:45 UTC, @_inception_ai on X
• GPT-6 Astra23 h 39 min after
  OpenAI
  First seen Sep 4, 19:10 UTC
  Announced Sep 3, 19:32 UTC, @OpenAI on X
  Announced with API access rolling out over the following days; we saw it 62 min before OpenAI's "also live in the API" post.
• Muse Spark 1.32 h 47 min before
  Meta
  First seen Sep 2, 16:49 UTC
  Announced Sep 2, 19:36 UTC, @AIatMeta on X
  Meta's blog post carries a date but no time, so it can't show an earlier announcement either way.
• Claude Fable 5.111 min before
  Anthropic
  First seen Sep 1, 17:52 UTC
  Announced Sep 1, 18:03 UTC, @claudeai on X
• Qwen 3.8 Max15 days after
  Alibaba
  First seen Aug 3, 03:52 UTC
  Announced Jul 19, 08:29 UTC, @Alibaba_Qwen on X
  The preview was announced Jul 19; we saw the full release 2 h 6 min after Qwen's Aug 3 post. Our own write-up calls it a miss.
• Claude Opus 58 min before
  Anthropic
  First seen Jul 24, 16:51 UTC
  Announced Jul 24, 16:59 UTC, @claudeai on X

Not in the table: Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.7, because xAI's announcements carry a date but no time, and the two most recent detections (Oct 5 and Oct 19), whose announcement times we haven't pinned down yet.

How we measured

First seen is when our sweep first found the model live in a provider's API or a public model catalog we read, logged at the time and confirmed by the next sweep about a minute later. It is the same timestamp the track record shows; nothing here was reconstructed afterwards.

The announcement is the lab's own post on X, with the exact second read from the post, or the lab's blog when its machine-readable publish time came earlier. Where a model was announced as a preview first, we measure against that first announcement, which is why several rows read as days after.

Limits: a lab's blog may carry only a date, so an earlier announcement we can't time can't be ruled out. Rollouts are staged and can differ by region and account, and “first seen” means first listed in a catalog we read, not that every customer could use it.

You can use these numbers with credit under CC BY 4.0. Cite as: ArtificialWatch, “Live before it's announced”, https://artificialwatch.com/lead-time.