Most AI models go live midweek: 68% of releases since July landed Tuesday to Thursday, and 5% on weekends

Of the 79 AI models ArtificialWatch logged going live on a public API from July 1 to November 4, 54 did so on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday (68%), and 4 on a weekend (5%).

THE DAYS

Monday 9, Tuesday 16, Wednesday 20, Thursday 18, Friday 12, Saturday 1, Sunday 3. Counting release days instead of models, so that two models out the same day count once, there were 54 release days, and Wednesday was the most common with 14.

BY LAB

OpenAI's 9 releases all came Monday to Thursday, and Google's 7 all Tuesday to Thursday. Anthropic's 7 came Monday to Friday, 3 of them on a Tuesday. xAI's 5 came Monday to Thursday. The four weekend releases were Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max (Saturday, August 1), Meta's Muse Glimmer 30B (Sunday, August 9), StepFun's Step 5 Preview (Sunday, September 20) and Meituan's LongCat 2.5 (Sunday, September 27).

FRONTIER MODELS

14 of the 79 were frontier releases, a lab's state-of-the-art model. 5 of those went live on a Tuesday, and Qwen 3.8 Max was the only one on a weekend.

THE HOUR

Our lead-time record times 21 launches to the minute. In 14 of them the lab's own announcement came between 16:00 and 20:00 UTC, the US West Coast morning.

HOW WE COUNTED

From ArtificialWatch's open release log (artificialwatch.com/data/releases.json, CC BY 4.0). The date is the day we verified each model live on a public API, in UTC, not the day it was announced. The log's coverage is fullest from July 2026, so the window starts July 1. Announcement hours are from artificialwatch.com/lead-time.