Providers
AI providers
The companies behind the models and apps we rank. Each page covers the company, its models and its apps.
- Anthropic
Anthropic is the safety-focused AI lab behind Claude. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, it pioneered Constitutional AI, leads independent coding benchmarks, and in 2026 became the world's most valuable AI startup at a $965 billion valuation while its revenue overtook OpenAI's.
- OpenAI
OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT and the GPT model family — the most-used AI products in the world. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015, it restructured into the OpenAI Group public-benefit corporation in 2025 (still controlled by its nonprofit Foundation), reached a $852 billion valuation in 2026, filed confidentially for an IPO targeting over $1 trillion, and runs the Stargate compute build-out with SoftBank, Oracle and Nvidia.
- Google
Google is the maker of Gemini and the only AI company with a full owned stack — frontier models from Google DeepMind, its own TPU chips, Google Cloud, and distribution through Search, Android, Chrome and Workspace. In August 2026 it restructured its AI leadership: Demis Hassabis stepped back, Sergey Brin returned from retirement to drive commercialisation, and Google's compute business is now outgrowing its model business.
- xAI
xAI is Elon Musk's AI lab and the maker of Grok. Founded in 2023 after Musk's split from OpenAI, it built the Colossus supercomputer, merged into SpaceX in February 2026 in the largest corporate combination ever (~$1.25 trillion), and competes at the frontier with the Grok models — while drawing intense regulatory scrutiny over Grok's image generation.
- Meta
Meta is the company behind Meta AI and the Llama open-weight models, and the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2025–2026 it spent over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and form Meta Superintelligence Labs, lost chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and shipped its first proprietary flagship, Muse Spark — a sharp pivot from its open-source-first past toward a centralised bet on superintelligence.
- Microsoft
Microsoft is the enterprise AI platform leader, distributing AI through Copilot across Microsoft 365, GitHub and Azure while hedging across three model sources: a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude inside Copilot, and its own in-house MAI models.
- Perplexity
Perplexity is the AI answer-engine company challenging traditional search. It pairs its own search-tuned Sonar models with a multi-model picker (GPT-5.2, Claude, Gemini, Grok) and the agentic Comet browser, monetises through subscriptions and enterprise rather than ads, and was valued at roughly $20 billion in 2026.
- Mistral AI
Mistral AI is the Paris-based lab behind Le Chat (now Vibe) and an open-weight model family that includes Mistral Large 3, Medium 3.5 and the Magistral reasoning models. Founded in 2023 by three French researchers, it is Europe's leading independent AI company — built around open weights, EU data sovereignty and aggressive efficiency — and in September 2026 raised €3 billion at a €21 billion valuation, Europe's largest technology round.
- DeepSeek
DeepSeek is the Hangzhou AI lab behind the DeepSeek app and the open-weight DeepSeek V4 and R-series models. Spun out of the quant hedge fund High-Flyer and run by founder Liang Wenfeng, it pairs frontier-adjacent quality with the lowest prices in the industry and an MIT licence, and in 2026 raised its first outside funding at a valuation above $50 billion.
- Alibaba
Alibaba is the Chinese technology group behind the Qwen models and Alibaba Cloud. Its Tongyi Laboratory has shipped 400+ open-weight Qwen models that together top 1 billion downloads — the world's most-downloaded open model family — while its flagship Max tier went closed with Qwen3.7-Max and partly reopened with open Qwen3.8 checkpoints in August 2026. In FY2026 its cloud business grew 38% as AI revenue posted an eleventh straight triple-digit quarter.
- Moonshot AI
Moonshot AI is the Beijing lab behind Kimi, one of China's 'Six AI Tigers'. Founded in 2023 by Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon researcher Yang Zhilin, it pioneered long-context chat and, in 2026, became the leading open-weight AI lab with its Kimi K2 models — raising about $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation while preparing for a Hong Kong IPO.
- Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI (internationally branded Z.ai) is the Beijing lab behind the open-weight GLM model family and the Z.ai assistant. Spun out of Tsinghua University in 2019, it is one of China's 'AI tigers', became the world's first listed large-language-model company on its January 2026 Hong Kong IPO, and pairs MIT-licensed open weights with an agentic-coding focus — all while on the US Entity List.
- MiniMax
MiniMax is a Hong Kong-listed Chinese AI company and the maker of the open-weight MiniMax M-series models, the Hailuo video generator and the Talkie companion app. Founded in 2021 by ex-SenseTime researchers and backed by MiHoYo, Alibaba and Tencent, it competes at the open-weight frontier — its MiniMax M3 matches top proprietary models on key benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.
- Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab is the San Francisco Bay Area AI lab founded in February 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. It raised the largest seed round on record — $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz — and ships open-weight, natively multimodal models: Inkling (July 2026) and Inkling-Small, both Apache 2.0, alongside Tinker, its fine-tuning service.
- Butterfly Effect
Butterfly Effect is the Singapore-headquartered company behind Manus, the autonomous AI agent that went viral in 2025. Founded in China by Xiao Hong, it builds no foundation models of its own — it orchestrates third-party models such as Claude and Qwen. In December 2025 Meta agreed to acquire it for more than $2 billion, but China's regulator blocked the deal and Meta began unwinding it in June 2026.
- TypeSafe AI
TypeSafe AI is the San Francisco lab that emerged from stealth on 15 September 2026 with Jev, the first of what it calls System One models: AI that returns typed decisions with calibrated probabilities for software to use, instead of generating text. It raised a $40 million seed round led by DCVC, and its CEO, Diogo Almeida, previously worked on RLHF, InstructGPT, ChatGPT and GPT-4 at OpenAI.