Chart of the Day · SEP 14, 2026

LLM Leaderboard Top 10: #1 Leads #10 by 18 Points

The #10 model on the Arena board would now win 47% of blind votes against #1. When the top ten are this close, quality stops deciding the sale.

Mode VC ·

The signal

The gap between Arena's #1 and #10 models fell from 148 points in Feb 2024 to 18. #10 now wins 47% of head-to-head votes against #1, up from 30%.

Rating of the #1 model minus the #10 and #20 models, Arena text board (overall), Arena points, 9 Jan 2024 – 13 Sept 2026.

#1 minus #10#1 minus #20
Sources: Arena leaderboard dataset (lmarena-ai, CC BY 4.0) · Launch feed (lab announcements, captured 7 Oct 2026)MODE VC

Ranks count every listed model, so effort variants of one model can fill several places: the 13 Sept 2026 top 10 holds models from only 3 labs. Counting each lab once, the gap from #1 to the fifth-best lab fell from 84 points (Jan 2024) to 32. Win rate uses Arena's scale: P(lower wins) = 1 / (1 + 10^(gap/400)).

Show the data (464 rows)
SeriesDateValueNote
#1 minus #102024-01-0997vicuna-33b
#1 minus #102024-01-1897vicuna-33b
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The Mode read

In the days before this snapshot, two more labs shipped models: DeepSeek with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Moonshot with Kimi K2.8 Preview. On the 13 Sept 2026 Arena snapshot, claude-fable-5.1-max is #1 and muse-spark-1.3-max is #10. The question behind every "LLM leaderboard top 10" search is how much the ranking matters.

Less and less. In Feb 2024 the #1 model led #10 by 148 points; today the gap is 18, and #1 to #20 is 32 (it was 188 in Feb 2024). At 18 points, #10 wins about 47% of blind votes against #1. On this snapshot 6 models are inside #1's confidence interval. Some of this is one lab's variants clustering, but counting each lab once the gap still fell from 84 to 32 points.

When ten models are this close, a buyer picks on other things: price, speed, data rules, and which vendor is already on the purchase order. That last one is distribution. A model sold inside a cloud account, a SaaS seat or an integrator's contract gets chosen without a bake-off, and the ranking rarely gets checked again.

When the top ten are tied, the buyer picks the vendor already on the invoice.

What we would back: Companies that sell AI through a channel the buyer already pays: a cloud marketplace listing, an existing SaaS seat, an integrator.