Frontier labs
The companies training the largest models.
| Company |
What it makes |
| OpenAI |
ChatGPT, and the GPT models underneath it |
| Anthropic |
Claude, and Claude Code for programming |
| Google DeepMind |
Gemini, built into Google’s products |
| Meta |
The Muse models. Meta was the major open-weight lab in the West until it made its best models closed |
| xAI |
Grok, built into X. Now a SpaceX subsidiary |
| Mistral |
French lab, open-weight. The main European player |
| DeepSeek |
Chinese lab, open-weight, near the frontier at a fraction of the price |
| Alibaba Qwen |
Chinese lab, open-weight, including its top-tier model |
| Z.ai |
Chinese lab, first pure-play model company to go public |
| Moonshot |
Chinese lab. Its Kimi model holds about a book’s worth of text in context |
| Cohere |
Enterprise-only: sells to companies, no consumer chatbot |
| AI21 |
Israeli lab. Uses a hybrid architecture rather than a pure transformer |
| Reka |
Multimodal: video, images, audio, and text in a single model |
| Ai2 |
Non-profit. Publishes training data alongside weights, which almost nobody does |
Four of those labs are Chinese, three of them open-weight. As of September 2026,
the best open-weight models (GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3) score 44 on the
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
against 53 for Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra.
| Company |
What it makes |
| Cursor |
Code editor with a model built in. Acquired by SpaceX |
| Cognition |
Devin, an agent that takes a ticket and works it end to end |
| Replit |
Browser-based development, no local setup at all |
| Lovable |
Describe an app in a sentence, get a deployed one. “Vibe coding” |
| Vercel |
Web hosting, plus v0, which generates interfaces from a description |
| Modal |
Rent a GPU by the second instead of the month |
| Parallel |
Search and retrieval APIs built for agents rather than people |
| Browserbase |
Hosted browsers an agent can click through |
| Magic.dev |
Long context, aimed at reading whole codebases |
| StackBlitz |
Bolt.new: prompt to running app in the browser |
Infrastructure
| Company |
What it makes |
| NVIDIA |
The GPUs, plus CUDA, the software layer that locked the industry in |
| Databricks |
Where enterprises store and prepare training data |
| CoreWeave |
A neocloud: rents GPU clusters, unlike general-purpose clouds |
| Cerebras |
Wafer-scale chips: one dinner-plate-sized chip replaces a rack |
| Groq |
Custom inference chips built for low latency |
| SambaNova |
Inference hardware deployed on-premises, inside a company’s own walls |
| Fireworks |
Fast, cheap inference for open-weight models |
| Together |
GPU clusters plus inference for open-source models |
| Baseten |
Takes a model you trained and keeps it serving production traffic |
| Lambda |
GPU cloud and workstations for ML engineers |
| Hugging Face |
The public repository for open models and datasets. NVIDIA is acquiring it |
| Scale AI |
Human-labeled training data and evaluation |
| LangChain |
Framework for chaining model calls into agents |
| Company |
What it makes |
| Midjourney |
Image generation. Never raised outside money, which is rare for a lab this size |
| Black Forest Labs |
FLUX, open-weight image models other products build on |
| Runway |
Video generation, moving toward world models: systems that simulate how scenes evolve rather than just producing frames |
| Luma AI |
Video with stronger spatial and temporal consistency |
| Synthesia |
Avatar presenters reading a script. Corporate training and comms |
| ElevenLabs |
Speech synthesis, dubbing, and voices for phone agents |
| Deepgram |
Speech-to-text APIs for developers |
| Suno |
Full songs, vocals and instrumentation, from a prompt |
Search and retrieval
| Company |
What it makes |
| Perplexity |
Answer engine: synthesizes a response instead of ranking links |
| Glean |
Enterprise search across a company’s internal tools |
Robotics and autonomy
| Company |
What it makes |
| Waymo |
Driverless robotaxis, commercially operating today |
| Figure AI |
Humanoid robots on BMW assembly lines |
| Skild AI |
One foundation model controlling many different robot bodies |
| Physical Intelligence |
Robot foundation models for ordinary manipulation tasks |
| 1X |
NEO, a humanoid intended for homes |
| Wayve |
End-to-end driving software licensed to carmakers |
| Nuro |
Autonomy stack licensed to manufacturers |
Defense
| Company |
What it makes |
| Anduril |
Autonomous systems sold as products, not cost-plus contracts |
| Shield AI |
Autonomy software that has flown F-16s |
| Applied Intuition |
Simulation and validation for autonomous vehicle programs |
Healthcare and bio
| Company |
What it makes |
| Isomorphic Labs |
DeepMind spinout applying AlphaFold’s approach to drug design |
| Abridge |
Ambient scribe: listens to a visit, produces the clinical note |
| Recursion |
Automated wet lab generating biological data to train on |
Applied enterprise
| Company |
What it makes |
| Harvey |
Legal work: contracts, diligence, research |
| Sierra |
Customer service agents that resolve issues end to end |
| Decagon |
Support agents across chat and voice |