Best Free AI Reasoning Models
View:
Compare the Top Free AI Reasoning Models as of August 2026
Sort By:
What are Free AI Reasoning Models?
AI reasoning models are artificial intelligence models designed to perform complex problem-solving, logical reasoning, planning, and multi-step decision-making beyond traditional language generation. These models use advanced inference techniques to break down difficult tasks, evaluate alternatives, apply logic, and generate more accurate responses for domains such as mathematics, programming, scientific research, business analysis, and autonomous AI agents. AI reasoning models often support extended context windows, tool use, code execution, structured outputs, and agentic workflows to solve complex real-world problems. Many are available through APIs, cloud platforms, and AI development frameworks, enabling developers to build intelligent applications and autonomous systems. By combining language understanding with advanced reasoning capabilities, AI reasoning models help organizations improve decision-making, automate complex workflows, and power next-generation AI applications. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free AI Reasoning Models currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
-
1
GLM-5.2
Zhipu AI
GLM-5.2 is an advanced AI foundation model designed to support complex reasoning, coding, and long-range agentic tasks. It helps developers, teams, and organizations build intelligent systems that can understand instructions, solve technical problems, and assist with demanding workflows. The model is especially useful for software engineering, automation, research, and productivity-focused applications. GLM-5.2 is built to handle large amounts of context, making it suitable for projects that require deeper understanding across extended conversations, documents, or codebases. Its mixture-of-experts design helps balance strong performance with more efficient model operation. GLM-5.2 gives businesses and developers a powerful AI tool for creating smarter applications, improving technical workflows, and supporting advanced digital experiences.Starting Price: Free -
2
Gemini 3.5 Flash
Google
Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google’s latest frontier AI model designed to combine advanced intelligence, high-speed performance, and agentic workflow execution for developers, enterprises, and everyday users. Built as part of the Gemini 3.5 family, the model excels at coding, long-horizon reasoning, multimodal understanding, and complex multi-step automation tasks while delivering significantly faster output speeds than many competing frontier models. Gemini 3.5 Flash powers AI agents capable of planning, executing, and managing workflows such as application development, codebase maintenance, data analysis, and financial document preparation through the Antigravity harness. The model also supports rich multimodal experiences by generating interactive graphics, dynamic web interfaces, animations, and advanced visual content. Gemini 3.5 Flash is integrated across Google products including the Gemini app, Google Search AI Mode, Google Antigravity, Google AI Studio, Android Studio, and more.Starting Price: $1.50 per 1M tokens (input) -
3
MiniMax M3
MiniMax
MiniMax M3 is an open-weight multimodal AI model designed for coding, agentic workflows, long-context reasoning, and complex automation tasks. The model combines frontier-level coding performance, native multimodal understanding, and a context window of up to 1 million tokens. MiniMax M3 uses MiniMax Sparse Attention to improve long-context efficiency while reducing compute requirements for large-scale inputs. It supports text, image, and video understanding, making it useful for workflows that combine code, documents, visual references, and tool-driven tasks. The model is built for repository-scale reasoning, software engineering, autonomous task execution, tool calling, and multi-step agent workflows. MiniMax M3 helps developers, AI teams, and enterprises build capable agents that can reason across large contexts and work with multimodal information.Starting Price: Free -
4
Inkling
Thinking Machines Lab
Inkling is an open-weights multimodal AI model from Thinking Machines designed as a customizable foundation model for developers, researchers, and enterprises. The model is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, and support for context windows up to 1 million tokens. Inkling was trained from scratch on text, images, audio, and video, giving it native capabilities across reasoning, coding, agentic tool use, vision, audio, factuality, and instruction following. It is built with controllable thinking effort so users can balance performance, latency, and token efficiency for different workloads. The model is available for fine-tuning on Tinker, with playground access, API availability through ecosystem partners, and full weights published on Hugging Face. Built for customization, Inkling gives teams an open-weights base model for building domain-specific AI systems, multimodal agents, coding workflows, research tools, and more.Starting Price: Free -
5
Claude Sonnet 3.5
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 3.5 sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval). It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone. Claude Sonnet 3.5 operates at twice the speed of Claude Opus 3. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude Sonnet 3.5 ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows.Starting Price: Free -
6
Grok 3
SpaceXAI
Grok-3, developed by xAI, represents a significant advancement in the field of artificial intelligence, aiming to set new benchmarks in AI capabilities. It is designed to be a multimodal AI, capable of processing and understanding data from various sources including text, images, and audio, which allows for a more integrated and comprehensive interaction with users. Grok-3 is built on an unprecedented scale, with training involving ten times more computational resources than its predecessor, leveraging 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs on the Colossus supercomputer. This extensive computational power is expected to enhance Grok-3's performance in areas like reasoning, coding, and real-time analysis of current events through direct access to X posts. The model is anticipated to outperform not only its earlier versions but also compete with other leading AI models in the generative AI landscape.Starting Price: Free -
7
GPT-4.5
OpenAI
GPT-4.5 is a powerful AI model that improves upon its predecessor by scaling unsupervised learning, enhancing reasoning abilities, and offering improved collaboration capabilities. Designed to better understand human intent and collaborate in more natural, intuitive ways, GPT-4.5 delivers higher accuracy and lower hallucination rates across a broad range of topics. Its advanced capabilities enable it to generate creative and insightful content, solve complex problems, and assist with tasks in writing, design, and even space exploration. With improved AI-human interactions, GPT-4.5 is optimized for practical applications, making it more accessible and reliable for businesses and developers.Starting Price: $75.00 / 1M tokens -
8
Grok 3 DeepSearch
SpaceXAI
Grok 3 DeepSearch is an advanced model and research agent designed to improve reasoning and problem-solving abilities in AI, with a strong focus on deep search and iterative reasoning. Unlike traditional models that rely solely on pre-trained knowledge, Grok 3 DeepSearch can explore multiple avenues, test hypotheses, and correct errors in real-time by analyzing vast amounts of information and engaging in chain-of-thought processes. It is designed for tasks that require critical thinking, such as complex mathematical problems, coding challenges, and intricate academic inquiries. Grok 3 DeepSearch is a cutting-edge AI tool capable of providing accurate and thorough solutions by using its unique deep search capabilities, making it ideal for both STEM and creative fields.Starting Price: $30/month -
9
Claude Sonnet 3.7
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 3.7, developed by Anthropic, is a cutting-edge AI model that combines rapid response with deep reflective reasoning. This innovative model allows users to toggle between quick, efficient responses and more thoughtful, reflective answers, making it ideal for complex problem-solving. By allowing Claude to self-reflect before answering, it excels at tasks that require high-level reasoning and nuanced understanding. With its ability to engage in deeper thought processes, Claude Sonnet 3.7 enhances tasks such as coding, natural language processing, and critical thinking applications. Available across various platforms, it offers a powerful tool for professionals and organizations seeking a high-performance, adaptable AI.Starting Price: Free -
10
DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-R1 is an advanced open-source reasoning model developed by DeepSeek, designed to rival OpenAI's Model o1. Accessible via web, app, and API, it excels in complex tasks such as mathematics and coding, demonstrating superior performance on benchmarks like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and MATH. DeepSeek-R1 employs a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture with 671 billion total parameters, activating 37 billion parameters per token, enabling efficient and accurate reasoning capabilities. This model is part of DeepSeek's commitment to advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI) through open-source innovation.Starting Price: Free -
11
Grok 3 Think
SpaceXAI
Grok 3 Think, the latest iteration of xAI's AI model, is designed to enhance reasoning capabilities using advanced reinforcement learning. It can think through complex problems for extended periods, from seconds to minutes, improving its answers by backtracking, exploring alternatives, and refining its approach. This model, trained on an unprecedented scale, delivers remarkable performance in tasks such as mathematics, coding, and world knowledge, showing impressive results in competitions like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination. Grok 3 Think not only provides accurate solutions but also offers transparency by allowing users to inspect the reasoning behind its decisions, setting a new standard for AI problem-solving.Starting Price: Free -
12
Kimi K2
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art open source large language model series built on a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, featuring 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion activated parameters for task-specific efficiency. Trained with the Muon optimizer on over 15.5 trillion tokens and stabilized by MuonClip’s attention-logit clamping, it delivers exceptional performance in frontier knowledge, reasoning, mathematics, coding, and general agentic workflows. Moonshot AI provides two variants, Kimi-K2-Base for research-level fine-tuning and Kimi-K2-Instruct pre-trained for immediate chat and tool-driven interactions, enabling both custom development and drop-in agentic capabilities. Benchmarks show it outperforms leading open source peers and rivals top proprietary models in coding tasks and complex task breakdowns, while its 128 K-token context length, tool-calling API compatibility, and support for industry-standard inference engines.Starting Price: Free -
13
Kimi K2 Thinking
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2 Thinking is an advanced open source reasoning model developed by Moonshot AI, designed specifically for long-horizon, multi-step workflows where the system interleaves chain-of-thought processes with tool invocation across hundreds of sequential tasks. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with a total of 1 trillion parameters, yet only about 32 billion parameters are activated per inference pass, optimizing efficiency while maintaining vast capacity. It supports a context window of up to 256,000 tokens, enabling the handling of extremely long inputs and reasoning chains without losing coherence. Native INT4 quantization is built in, which reduces inference latency and memory usage without performance degradation. Kimi K2 Thinking is explicitly built for agentic workflows; it can autonomously call external tools, manage sequential logic steps (up to and typically between 200-300 tool calls in a single chain), and maintain consistent reasoning.Starting Price: Free -
14
Kimi K2.5
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.5 is a next-generation multimodal AI model designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and visual understanding tasks. It features a native multimodal architecture that supports both text and visual inputs, enabling image and video comprehension alongside natural language processing. Kimi K2.5 delivers open-source state-of-the-art performance in agent workflows, software development, and general intelligence tasks. The model offers ultra-long context support with a 256K token window, making it suitable for large documents and complex conversations. It includes long-thinking capabilities that allow multi-step reasoning and tool invocation for solving challenging problems. Kimi K2.5 is fully compatible with the OpenAI API format, allowing developers to switch seamlessly with minimal changes. With strong performance, flexibility, and developer-focused tooling, Kimi K2.5 is built for production-grade AI applications.Starting Price: Free -
15
GLM-5
Zhipu AI
GLM-5 is Z.ai’s latest large language model built for complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks. It scales significantly beyond GLM-4.5, increasing total parameters and training data while integrating DeepSeek Sparse Attention to reduce deployment costs without sacrificing long-context capacity. The model combines enhanced pre-training with a new asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure called slime, improving training efficiency and post-training refinement. GLM-5 achieves best-in-class performance among open-source models across reasoning, coding, and agent benchmarks, narrowing the gap with leading frontier models. It ranks highly on evaluations such as Vending Bench 2, demonstrating strong long-term planning and operational capabilities. The model is open-sourced under the MIT License.Starting Price: Free -
16
GLM-5.1
Zhipu AI
GLM-5.1 is the latest iteration of Z.ai’s GLM series, designed as a frontier-level, agent-oriented AI model optimized for coding, reasoning, and long-horizon workflows. It builds on the GLM-5 architecture, which uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design to deliver high performance while keeping inference costs efficient, and is part of a broader push toward open-weight, developer-accessible models. A core focus of GLM-5.1 is enabling agentic behavior, meaning it can plan, execute, and iterate across multi-step tasks rather than simply responding to single prompts. It is specifically designed to handle complex workflows such as debugging code, navigating repositories, and executing chained operations with sustained context. Compared to earlier models, GLM-5.1 improves reliability in long interactions, maintaining coherence across extended sessions and reducing breakdowns in multi-step reasoning.Starting Price: Free -
17
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview
Alibaba
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview is a next-generation frontier language model designed to push the limits of intelligence, instruction following, and real-world agent capabilities within the Qwen ecosystem. Building on the Qwen3 series, this preview release introduces stronger world knowledge, sharper instruction alignment, and significant improvements in agentic coding performance, enabling the model to better handle complex, multi-step tasks and software engineering workflows. It is engineered for advanced reasoning and execution scenarios, where the model not only generates responses but also interacts with tools, processes long contexts, and supports structured problem-solving across domains such as coding, research, and enterprise workflows. The architecture continues the Qwen focus on large-scale, high-efficiency models capable of handling extensive context windows and delivering consistent performance across multilingual and knowledge-intensive tasks.Starting Price: Free -
18
Kimi K2.6
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.6 is a next-generation agentic AI model developed by Moonshot AI, designed to push forward real-world execution, coding, and multi-step reasoning beyond earlier K2 and K2.5 versions. It builds on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and the multimodal, agent-first foundation of the Kimi series, combining language understanding, coding, and tool use into a single system capable of planning and executing complex workflows. It introduces deeper reasoning capabilities and significantly improved agent planning, allowing it to break down tasks, coordinate tools, and handle multi-file or multi-step problems with greater accuracy and efficiency. It supports advanced tool calling with high reliability, enabling integration with external systems such as web search or APIs, and includes built-in validation mechanisms to ensure correct execution formats.Starting Price: Free -
19
Grok 2
SpaceXAI
Grok-2, the latest iteration in AI technology, is a marvel of modern engineering, designed to push the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can achieve. Inspired by the wit and wisdom of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the efficiency of JARVIS from Iron Man, Grok-2 is not just another AI; it's a companion in the truest sense. With an expanded knowledge base that stretches up to the recent past, Grok-2 offers insights with a touch of humor and an outside perspective on humanity, making it uniquely engaging. Its capabilities include answering nearly any question with maximum helpfulness, often providing solutions that are both innovative and outside the conventional box. Grok-2's design emphasizes truthfulness, avoiding the pitfalls of woke culture, and strives to be maximally truthful, making it a reliable source of information and entertainment in an increasingly complex world.Starting Price: Free -
20
Perplexity Research
Perplexity AI
Perplexity Research is an advanced AI-powered deep research tool designed to conduct thorough analyses across a wide range of complex subjects. By emulating human-like research processes, it iteratively searches, reads, and evaluates documents, refining its approach to develop a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Upon completing its analysis, Perplexity Research synthesizes the gathered information into clear, detailed reports, which users can export as PDFs or shareable web pages. This tool excels in various domains, including finance, marketing, technology, health, and travel planning, enabling users to perform expert-level research efficiently. Deep Research is currently accessible on the web, with plans to expand to iOS, Android, and Mac platforms, and is available for free, offering unlimited queries to Pro subscribers and a limited number of daily answers to non-subscribers.Starting Price: Free -
21
QwQ-32B
Alibaba
QwQ-32B is an advanced reasoning model developed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team, designed to enhance AI's problem-solving capabilities. With 32 billion parameters, it achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art models like DeepSeek's R1, which has 671 billion parameters. This efficiency is achieved through optimized parameter utilization, allowing QwQ-32B to perform complex tasks such as mathematical reasoning, coding, and general problem-solving with fewer resources. The model supports a context length of up to 32,000 tokens, enabling it to process extensive input data effectively. QwQ-32B is accessible via Alibaba's chatbot service, Qwen Chat, and is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting collaboration and further development within the AI community.Starting Price: Free -
22
Mistral Large 2
Mistral AI
Mistral AI has launched the Mistral Large 2, an advanced AI model designed to excel in code generation, multilingual capabilities, and complex reasoning tasks. The model features a 128k context window, supporting dozens of languages including English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as over 80 programming languages. Mistral Large 2 is tailored for high-throughput single-node inference, making it ideal for large-context applications. Its improved performance on benchmarks like MMLU and its enhanced code generation and reasoning abilities ensure accuracy and efficiency. The model also incorporates better function calling and retrieval, supporting complex business applications.Starting Price: Free -
23
EXAONE Deep
LG
EXAONE Deep is a series of reasoning-enhanced language models developed by LG AI Research, featuring parameter sizes of 2.4 billion, 7.8 billion, and 32 billion. These models demonstrate superior capabilities in various reasoning tasks, including math and coding benchmarks. Notably, EXAONE Deep 2.4B outperforms other models of comparable size, EXAONE Deep 7.8B surpasses both open-weight models of similar scale and the proprietary reasoning model OpenAI o1-mini, and EXAONE Deep 32B shows competitive performance against leading open-weight models. The repository provides comprehensive documentation covering performance evaluations, quickstart guides for using EXAONE Deep models with Transformers, explanations of quantized EXAONE Deep weights in AWQ and GGUF formats, and instructions for running EXAONE Deep models locally using frameworks like llama.cpp and Ollama.Starting Price: Free -
24
Llama 4 Behemoth
Meta
Llama 4 Behemoth is Meta's most powerful AI model to date, featuring a massive 288 billion active parameters. It excels in multimodal tasks, outperforming previous models like GPT-4.5 and Gemini 2.0 Pro across multiple STEM-focused benchmarks such as MATH-500 and GPQA Diamond. As the teacher model for the Llama 4 series, Behemoth sets the foundation for models like Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout. While still in training, Llama 4 Behemoth demonstrates unmatched intelligence, pushing the boundaries of AI in fields like math, multilinguality, and image understanding.Starting Price: Free -
25
Llama 4 Maverick
Meta
Llama 4 Maverick is one of the most advanced multimodal AI models from Meta, featuring 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts. It surpasses its competitors like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash in a broad range of benchmarks, especially in tasks related to coding, reasoning, and multilingual capabilities. Llama 4 Maverick combines image and text understanding, enabling it to deliver industry-leading results in image-grounding tasks and precise, high-quality output. With its efficient performance at a reduced parameter size, Maverick offers exceptional value, especially in general assistant and chat applications.Starting Price: Free -
26
Llama 4 Scout
Meta
Llama 4 Scout is a powerful 17 billion active parameter multimodal AI model that excels in both text and image processing. With an industry-leading context length of 10 million tokens, it outperforms its predecessors, including Llama 3, in tasks such as multi-document summarization and parsing large codebases. Llama 4 Scout is designed to handle complex reasoning tasks while maintaining high efficiency, making it perfect for use cases requiring long-context comprehension and image grounding. It offers cutting-edge performance in image-related tasks and is particularly well-suited for applications requiring both text and visual understanding.Starting Price: Free -
27
Qwen3
Alibaba
Qwen3, the latest iteration of the Qwen family of large language models, introduces groundbreaking features that enhance performance across coding, math, and general capabilities. With models like the Qwen3-235B-A22B and Qwen3-30B-A3B, Qwen3 achieves impressive results compared to top-tier models, thanks to its hybrid thinking modes that allow users to control the balance between deep reasoning and quick responses. The platform supports 119 languages and dialects, making it an ideal choice for global applications. Its pre-training process, which uses 36 trillion tokens, enables robust performance, and advanced reinforcement learning (RL) techniques continue to refine its capabilities. Available on platforms like Hugging Face and ModelScope, Qwen3 offers a powerful tool for developers and researchers working in diverse fields.Starting Price: Free -
28
DeepSeek V3.1
DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3.1 is a groundbreaking open-weight large language model featuring a massive 685-billion parameters and an extended 128,000‑token context window, enabling it to process documents equivalent to 400-page books in a single prompt. It delivers integrated capabilities for chat, reasoning, and code generation within a unified hybrid architecture, seamlessly blending these functions into one coherent model. V3.1 supports a variety of tensor formats to give developers flexibility in optimizing performance across different hardware. Early benchmark results show robust performance, including a 71.6% score on the Aider coding benchmark, putting it on par with or ahead of systems like Claude Opus 4 and doing so at a far lower cost. Made available under an open source license on Hugging Face with minimal fanfare, DeepSeek V3.1 is poised to reshape access to high-performance AI, challenging traditional proprietary models.Starting Price: Free -
29
GLM-4.6
Zhipu AI
GLM-4.6 advances upon its predecessor with stronger reasoning, coding, and agentic capabilities: it demonstrates clear improvements in inferential performance, supports tool use during inference, and more effectively integrates into agent frameworks. In benchmark tests spanning reasoning, coding, and agents, GLM-4.6 outperforms GLM-4.5 and shows competitive strength against models such as DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp and Claude Sonnet 4, though it still trails Claude Sonnet 4.5 in pure coding performance. In real-world tests using an extended “CC-Bench” suite across front-end development, tool building, data analysis, and algorithmic tasks, GLM-4.6 beats GLM-4.5 and approaches parity with Claude Sonnet 4, winning ~48.6% of head-to-head comparisons, while also achieving ~15% better token efficiency. GLM-4.6 is available via the Z.ai API, and developers can integrate it as an LLM backend or agent core using the platform’s API.Starting Price: Free -
30
DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp
DeepSeek
Introducing DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, our latest experimental model built on V3.1-Terminus, debuting DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) for faster and more efficient inference and training on long contexts. DSA enables fine-grained sparse attention with minimal loss in output quality, boosting performance for long-context tasks while reducing compute costs. Benchmarks indicate that V3.2-Exp performs on par with V3.1-Terminus despite these efficiency gains. The model is now live across app, web, and API. Alongside this, the DeepSeek API prices have been cut by over 50% immediately to make access more affordable. For a transitional period, users can still access V3.1-Terminus via a temporary API endpoint until October 15, 2025. DeepSeek welcomes feedback on DSA via its feedback portal. In conjunction with the release, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has been open-sourced: the model weights and supporting technology (including key GPU kernels in TileLang and CUDA) are available on Hugging Face.Starting Price: Free