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AI model releases in Q3 2026

July to September 2026 in numbers: every model ArtificialWatch logged as live on a public API, dated by the day it went live (not the day it was announced), and the launches it could time against the lab's own announcement.

By month

By lab

OpenAI 7 · Anthropic 6 · Meta 6 · Google 5 · xAI 4 · Alibaba 3 · Ant Group 2 · Thinking Machines 2 · Zhipu AI 2 · Black Forest Labs 1 · ByteDance 1 · Circuit & Chisel 1 · DeepReinforce 1 · DeepSeek 1 · Fireworks AI 1 · IBM 1 · IFM 1 · Inception 1 · Meituan 1 · MiniMax 1 · Moonshot 1 · Motif Technologies 1 · NEX AGI 1 · NVIDIA 1 · Perceptron 1 · PrismML 1 · Sakana AI 1 · Sapiens AI 1 · Shanghai AI Lab 1 · StepFun 1 · Tencent 1 · Upstage 1 · Xiaomi 1

The frontier releases

• Jul 1Fable 5 · Anthropic
• Jul 9ChatGPT-5.6 · OpenAI
• Jul 24Claude Opus 5 · Anthropic
• Aug 1Qwen 3.8 Max · Alibaba
• Sep 1Mythos 5.1 · Anthropic
• Sep 1Fable 5.1 · Anthropic
• Sep 3GPT-6 Astra · OpenAI
• Sep 21Grok 4.7 · xAI
• Sep 22Claude Opus 5.5 · Anthropic
• Sep 28Claude Sonnet 5.5 · Anthropic
• Sep 29GPT-6.1 Sol · OpenAI

Live before it was announced

The Q3 2026 launches ArtificialWatch could time to the minute: when its sweep first found the model answering on a public API, against the lab's own first announcement. The dates here are those first sightings, so one can fall a day or two after the release date above. Method and every launch since July: live before it's announced.

• Jul 24Claude Opus 5 · Anthropic8 min before
• Aug 3Qwen 3.8 Max · Alibaba15 days after
• Sep 1Claude Fable 5.1 · Anthropic11 min before
• Sep 2Muse Spark 1.3 · Meta2 h 47 min before
• Sep 4GPT-6 Astra · OpenAI23 h 39 min after
• Sep 9Mercury 2.5 · Inception13 h 56 min after
• Sep 22Claude Opus 5.5 · Anthropic6 min before
• Sep 28Claude Sonnet 5.5 · Anthropic9 min before
• Sep 30Ling 3.1 Flash · Ant Group1 h 48 min after

The whole year: AI models released in 2026 and the release timeline. The data, free to reuse: releases CSV · lead-time CSV.