We found the newest release from z.AI to represent a step up for open-source models, especially on Terminal-Bench 2, on which the model places seventh overall and beats Kimi K2.5 for top open-weight model by a huge margin (9%).

The model surpasses Kimi as leading the open-weight category in several other benchmarks as well, most notably on Finance Agent, on which it breaks 50% and places 11th overall.

The biggest story here is price - the model is several times cheaper than leading closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic. However, Kimi K2.5 is 2.5x cheaper still on our Vals Index, on which it places first due to superior performance on CorpFin.

We evaluated the model with the following parameters:

• temperature 0.7 and low max output tokens on agentic coding benchmarks (16K on SWE-bench and 8K on Terminal-Bench 2)
• 65K max output tokens on CaseLaw and CorpFin
• temperature 1 and 130K max output tokens otherwise

We’ve done a full review of the data, harness, and evaluation for Finance Agent, and are releasing it today as “FAB v1.1”!

• On the data, we ran quality control on the benchmark data using finance experts from leading global investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds, including Goldman Sachs, Silver Lake, and Citadel.
• We made several notable improvements to the harness, such as upgrading the search provider to Tavily, switching submission to a tool call, and improving instructions on rounding.
• Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) remains on top, although many models like Gemini 3 Pro (11/25) and Grok 4.1 Fast (Reasoning) saw major improvements.

We will continue to release refreshes on our benchmarks to ensure quality remains at the same high standard.

The newly-released Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) has taken first place on both our Vals Index and Vals Multimodal Index, both by substantial margins. Here are our key takeaways:

• Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) is head and shoulders above the competition on coding tasks, placing first on by several percent on SWE-bench and tying Claude Opus 4.5 (Thinking) for first on Terminal Bench 2.
• Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) also excels across other domains, placing first on our Finance Agent Benchmark and our new formal math benchmark, ProofBench.
• Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) is performant across the board, placing among the top 10 across all the benchmarks on which we’ve evaluated it so far, with the sole exception of CaseLaw.
• Claude Opus 4.6 (Thinking) is fast - it’s faster than comparable GPT models (though slower on our index than Gemini 3 Pro (11/25)) and the fastest model on our LegalBench leaderboard.

Congrats to Anthropic on the release!

We found that Qwen 3 Max Thinking shines on financial tasks, but struggles on coding evaluations when compared to its predecessor, Qwen 3 Max. We attribute the difference to use of new “reasoning” mode like those featured by closed-source providers.

Its most impressive finish is second on CorpFin, behind Kimi K2.5. It also improves by 10% over its predecessor on our Finance Agent Benchmark.

By contrast, it performs worse than Qwen 3 Max on both SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench 2, placing 20th and 25th, respectively.

We also found that the model can get expensive on long-context agentic tasks, with the highest pricing tier equivalent to that of the Claude Sonnet models. Additionally, the model is worse than its predecessor at context caching, which increases prices per token further.

Congrats to the team at Alibaba on the release!