Which AI models are the most
popular in May 2026?
Monthly rankings of the most-used AI language models, commercial and open source. Data sourced from HuggingFace, web reports, and real-time research. Updated automatically every month.
“As of May 2026, OpenAI's GPT-4o remains the most widely used commercial model with over 400M users, while newer releases like GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 are rapidly gaining traction. The market is split between high-performance closed models and cost-effective open-source alternatives like DeepSeek V4-Pro, with multimodal capabilities becoming a key differentiator.”
Commercial models
Usage estimates based on public reports and web research (Perplexity).
ChatGPT reached 400M weekly active users in early 2026 (OpenAI blog, Feb 2026)
400M+
GPT-5.5 Instant became the new default in ChatGPT on May 5, 2026 (OpenAI, May 5 2026)
150M+
Claude Opus 4.8 topped the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index in mid-2026 (Anthropic blog, May 28 2026)
120M+
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the balanced everyday workhorse for real users (Anthropic review, May 2026)
90M+
Gemini 3.1 Pro leads on multimodal tasks with 94.3% GPQA Diamond score (Google AI, May 2026)
110M+
Gemini 3.5 Flash is optimized for fast, high-volume everyday tasks (Google AI blog, May 2026)
80M+
DeepSeek V4-Pro is the strongest open-weight model at $0.27/M input tokens (DeepSeek API, April 24 2026)
50M+
Grok-4 ranks among the top generalists in 2026 alongside GPT-5.2 (Zapier report, May 2026)
40M+
Qwen 3.6 Max-Preview tops six coding benchmarks simultaneously (Alibaba Cloud, May 2026)
35M+
Open source models
Ranked by total downloads on HuggingFace, a strong proxy for developer and researcher adoption.
Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B
Qwen/Qwen3-8B
Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
Qwen/Qwen3-4B
Qwen/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct
meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
Sources
- https://www.buildfastwithai.com/blogs/best-ai-models-may-2026
- https://www.buildfastwithai.com/blogs/latest-best-ai-models-may-2026
- https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/12-of-the-best-large-language-models
- https://mindshub.ai/blog/navigating-the-llm-landscape-a-comparative-analysis-of-…
- https://22software.com/blog/top-10-most-popular-ai-models
How does your brand rank in these models?
Mentova tracks how often your brand is mentioned in AI responses across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more.
Track your brand for free