Best Free Foundation Models
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Compare the Top Free Foundation Models as of August 2026
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What are Free Foundation Models?
Foundation models are large-scale artificial intelligence models trained on vast and diverse datasets that serve as the underlying technology for a wide range of AI applications. These models learn general-purpose capabilities such as language understanding, reasoning, image recognition, code generation, speech processing, and multimodal comprehension, allowing them to be adapted or fine-tuned for specific tasks across industries. Foundation models power applications including chatbots, AI agents, search, content generation, software development, scientific research, and business automation. Many are available through cloud APIs, open-source distributions, and enterprise AI platforms, supporting custom model development, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and domain-specific optimization. By providing reusable, general-purpose intelligence, foundation models enable organizations to accelerate AI development, reduce implementation costs, and build sophisticated AI-powered applications. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free Foundation Models currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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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
Anthropic
Claude is a next-generation AI assistant developed by Anthropic to help individuals and teams solve complex problems with safety, accuracy, and reliability at its core. It is designed to support a wide range of tasks, including writing, editing, coding, data analysis, and research. Claude allows users to create and iterate on documents, websites, graphics, and code directly within chat using collaborative tools like Artifacts. The platform supports file uploads, image analysis, and data visualization to enhance productivity and understanding. Claude is available across web, iOS, and Android, making it accessible wherever work happens. With built-in web search and extended reasoning capabilities, Claude helps users find information and think through challenging problems more effectively. Anthropic emphasizes security, privacy, and responsible AI development to ensure Claude can be trusted in professional and personal workflows.Starting Price: Free -
6
Gemini
Google
Gemini is Google’s advanced AI assistant designed to help users think, create, learn, and complete tasks with a new level of intelligence. Powered by Google’s most capable models, including Gemini 3, it enables users to ask complex questions, generate content, analyze information, and explore ideas through natural conversation. Gemini can create images, videos, summaries, study plans, and first drafts while also providing feedback on uploaded files and written work. The platform is grounded in Google Search, allowing it to deliver accurate, up-to-date information and support deep follow-up questions. Gemini connects seamlessly with Google apps like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, YouTube, and Photos to help users complete tasks without switching tools. Features such as Gemini Live, Deep Research, and Gems enhance brainstorming, research, and personalized workflows. Available through flexible free and paid plans, Gemini supports everyday users, students, and professionals across devices.Starting Price: Free -
7
GPT-3
OpenAI
Our GPT-3 models can understand and generate natural language. We offer four main models with different levels of power suitable for different tasks. Davinci is the most capable model, and Ada is the fastest. The main GPT-3 models are meant to be used with the text completion endpoint. We also offer models that are specifically meant to be used with other endpoints. Davinci is the most capable model family and can perform any task the other models can perform and often with less instruction. For applications requiring a lot of understanding of the content, like summarization for a specific audience and creative content generation, Davinci is going to produce the best results. These increased capabilities require more compute resources, so Davinci costs more per API call and is not as fast as the other models.Starting Price: $0.0200 per 1000 tokens -
8
GPT-4
OpenAI
GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4) is a large-scale unsupervised language model, yet to be released by OpenAI. GPT-4 is the successor to GPT-3 and part of the GPT-n series of natural language processing models, and was trained on a dataset of 45TB of text to produce human-like text generation and understanding capabilities. Unlike most other NLP models, GPT-4 does not require additional training data for specific tasks. Instead, it can generate text or answer questions using only its own internally generated context as input. GPT-4 has been shown to be able to perform a wide variety of tasks without any task specific training data such as translation, summarization, question answering, sentiment analysis and more.Starting Price: $0.0200 per 1000 tokens -
9
GPT-3.5
OpenAI
GPT-3.5 is the next evolution of GPT 3 large language model from OpenAI. GPT-3.5 models can understand and generate natural language. We offer four main models with different levels of power suitable for different tasks. The main GPT-3.5 models are meant to be used with the text completion endpoint. We also offer models that are specifically meant to be used with other endpoints. Davinci is the most capable model family and can perform any task the other models can perform and often with less instruction. For applications requiring a lot of understanding of the content, like summarization for a specific audience and creative content generation, Davinci is going to produce the best results. These increased capabilities require more compute resources, so Davinci costs more per API call and is not as fast as the other models.Starting Price: $0.0200 per 1000 tokens -
10
GPT-4 Turbo
OpenAI
GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting text or image inputs and outputting text) that can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy than any of our previous models, thanks to its broader general knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities. GPT-4 is available in the OpenAI API to paying customers. Like gpt-3.5-turbo, GPT-4 is optimized for chat but works well for traditional completions tasks using the Chat Completions API. GPT-4 is the latest GPT-4 model with improved instruction following, JSON mode, reproducible outputs, parallel function calling, and more. Returns a maximum of 4,096 output tokens. This preview model is not yet suited for production traffic.Starting Price: $0.0200 per 1000 tokens -
11
Mistral AI
Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a pioneering artificial intelligence startup specializing in open-source generative AI. The company offers a range of customizable, enterprise-grade AI solutions deployable across various platforms, including on-premises, cloud, edge, and devices. Flagship products include "Le Chat," a multilingual AI assistant designed to enhance productivity in both personal and professional contexts, and "La Plateforme," a developer platform that enables the creation and deployment of AI-powered applications. Committed to transparency and innovation, Mistral AI positions itself as a leading independent AI lab, contributing significantly to open-source AI and policy development.Starting Price: Free -
12
Cohere
Cohere AI
Cohere is an enterprise AI platform that enables developers and businesses to build powerful language-based applications. Specializing in large language models (LLMs), Cohere provides solutions for text generation, summarization, and semantic search. Their model offerings include the Command family for high-performance language tasks and Aya Expanse for multilingual applications across 23 languages. Focused on security and customization, Cohere allows flexible deployment across major cloud providers, private cloud environments, or on-premises setups to meet diverse enterprise needs. The company collaborates with industry leaders like Oracle and Salesforce to integrate generative AI into business applications, improving automation and customer engagement. Additionally, Cohere For AI, their research lab, advances machine learning through open-source projects and a global research community.Starting Price: Free -
13
Grok
SpaceXAI
Grok is an advanced AI assistant developed by xAI, designed to provide real-time insights, intelligent responses, and conversational support. It is deeply integrated with the X (formerly Twitter) platform, allowing users to access up-to-date information and trending discussions. Grok is built to answer complex questions with a mix of reasoning, humor, and personality. It can assist with tasks such as research, content creation, and general problem-solving. The platform leverages large language models to deliver accurate and context-aware responses. Grok stands out for its ability to access live data, making it highly relevant for current events. Overall, it offers a dynamic and engaging AI experience for everyday users.Starting Price: Free -
14
GPT-4o
OpenAI
GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time (opens in a new window) in a conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.Starting Price: $5.00 / 1M tokens -
15
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 -
16
Claude Opus 3
Anthropic
Opus, our most intelligent model, outperforms its peers on most of the common evaluation benchmarks for AI systems, including undergraduate level expert knowledge (MMLU), graduate level expert reasoning (GPQA), basic mathematics (GSM8K), and more. It exhibits near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks, leading the frontier of general intelligence. All Claude 3 models show increased capabilities in analysis and forecasting, nuanced content creation, code generation, and conversing in non-English languages like Spanish, Japanese, and French.Starting Price: Free -
17
DeepSeek-V3
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3 is a state-of-the-art AI model designed to deliver unparalleled performance in natural language understanding, advanced reasoning, and decision-making tasks. Leveraging next-generation neural architectures, it integrates extensive datasets and fine-tuned algorithms to tackle complex challenges across diverse domains such as research, development, business intelligence, and automation. With a focus on scalability and efficiency, DeepSeek-V3 provides developers and enterprises with cutting-edge tools to accelerate innovation and achieve transformative outcomes.Starting Price: Free -
18
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 -
19
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 -
20
Goku
ByteDance
The Goku AI model, developed by ByteDance, is an open source advanced artificial intelligence system designed to generate high-quality video content based on given prompts. It utilizes deep learning techniques to create stunning visuals and animations, particularly focused on producing realistic, character-driven scenes. By leveraging state-of-the-art models and a vast dataset, Goku AI allows users to create custom video clips with incredible accuracy, transforming text-based input into compelling and immersive visual experiences. The model is particularly adept at producing dynamic characters, especially in the context of popular anime and action scenes, offering creators a unique tool for video production and digital content creation.Starting Price: Free -
21
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 -
22
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 -
23
Wan2.1
Alibaba
Wan2.1 is an open-source suite of advanced video foundation models designed to push the boundaries of video generation. This cutting-edge model excels in various tasks, including Text-to-Video, Image-to-Video, Video Editing, and Text-to-Image, offering state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Wan2.1 is compatible with consumer-grade GPUs, making it accessible to a broader audience, and supports multiple languages, including both Chinese and English for text generation. The model's powerful video VAE (Variational Autoencoder) ensures high efficiency and excellent temporal information preservation, making it ideal for generating high-quality video content. Its applications span across entertainment, marketing, and more.Starting Price: Free -
24
Qwen
Alibaba
Qwen is a powerful, free AI assistant built on the advanced Qwen model series, designed to help anyone with creativity, research, problem-solving, and everyday tasks. While Qwen Chat is the main interface for most users, Qwen itself powers a broad range of intelligent capabilities including image generation, deep research, website creation, advanced reasoning, and context-aware search. Its multimodal intelligence enables Qwen to understand and process text, images, audio, and video simultaneously for richer insights. Qwen is available on web, desktop, and mobile, ensuring seamless access across all devices. For developers, the Qwen API provides OpenAI-compatible endpoints, making integration simple and allowing Qwen’s intelligence to power apps, services, and automation. Whether you're chatting through Qwen Chat or building with the Qwen API, Qwen delivers fast, flexible, and highly capable AI support.Starting Price: Free -
25
GPT-4o mini
OpenAI
A small model with superior textual intelligence and multimodal reasoning. GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its low cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots). Today, GPT-4o mini supports text and vision in the API, with support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs coming in the future. The model has a context window of 128K tokens, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and has knowledge up to October 2023. Thanks to the improved tokenizer shared with GPT-4o, handling non-English text is now even more cost effective. -
26
Gemini Flash
Google
Gemini Flash is an advanced large language model (LLM) from Google, specifically designed for high-speed, low-latency language processing tasks. Part of Google DeepMind’s Gemini series, Gemini Flash is tailored to provide real-time responses and handle large-scale applications, making it ideal for interactive AI-driven experiences such as customer support, virtual assistants, and live chat solutions. Despite its speed, Gemini Flash doesn’t compromise on quality; it’s built on sophisticated neural architectures that ensure responses remain contextually relevant, coherent, and precise. Google has incorporated rigorous ethical frameworks and responsible AI practices into Gemini Flash, equipping it with guardrails to manage and mitigate biased outputs, ensuring it aligns with Google’s standards for safe and inclusive AI. With Gemini Flash, Google empowers businesses and developers to deploy responsive, intelligent language tools that can meet the demands of fast-paced environments. -
27
Gemini 2.0
Google
Gemini 2.0 is an advanced AI-powered model developed by Google, designed to offer groundbreaking capabilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and multimodal interactions. Building on the success of its predecessor, Gemini 2.0 integrates large language processing with enhanced problem-solving and decision-making abilities, enabling it to interpret and generate human-like responses with greater accuracy and nuance. Unlike traditional AI models, Gemini 2.0 is trained to handle multiple data types simultaneously, including text, images, and code, making it a versatile tool for research, business, education, and creative industries. Its core improvements include better contextual understanding, reduced bias, and a more efficient architecture that ensures faster, more reliable outputs. Gemini 2.0 is positioned as a major step forward in the evolution of AI, pushing the boundaries of human-computer interaction.Starting Price: Free -
28
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 -
29
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 -
30
Qwen-7B
Alibaba
Qwen-7B is the 7B-parameter version of the large language model series, Qwen (abbr. Tongyi Qianwen), proposed by Alibaba Cloud. Qwen-7B is a Transformer-based large language model, which is pretrained on a large volume of data, including web texts, books, codes, etc. Additionally, based on the pretrained Qwen-7B, we release Qwen-7B-Chat, a large-model-based AI assistant, which is trained with alignment techniques. The features of the Qwen-7B series include: Trained with high-quality pretraining data. We have pretrained Qwen-7B on a self-constructed large-scale high-quality dataset of over 2.2 trillion tokens. The dataset includes plain texts and codes, and it covers a wide range of domains, including general domain data and professional domain data. Strong performance. In comparison with the models of the similar model size, we outperform the competitors on a series of benchmark datasets, which evaluates natural language understanding, mathematics, coding, etc. And more.Starting Price: Free