SmophyAI

Published daily · Next update 02:00 UTC

general · 25.6% of classified traffic

Best AI model for classification

As of August 9, 2026, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 leads classification with 15% of classified production usage for this task on OpenRouter. Ranking reflects what developers actually run for this task, not a benchmark opinion.

  1. #1 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 - 15% of task usage
  2. #2 Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite (batch) - 10% of task usage
  3. #3 OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Luna (batch) - 7% of task usage
  4. #4 Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash (batch) - 6% of task usage
  5. #5 OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b - 5% of task usage
  6. #6 OpenAI: GPT-4o-mini (batch) - 5% of task usage
  7. #7 Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (batch) - 3% of task usage
  8. #8 Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview (batch) - 3% of task usage
  9. #9 Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) - 3% of task usage
Ranked by share of classification usage
#ModelTask usageQuality
01DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash 042315.2%51.8
02Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite (batch)10.0%-
03OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Luna (batch)7.3%52.3
04Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash (batch)5.7%-
05OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b5.0%24.1
06OpenAI: GPT-4o-mini (batch)4.9%-
07Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (batch)3.4%-
08Google: Gemini 3 Flash Preview (batch)3.1%-
09Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free)2.9%26.1

Task usage shares come from OpenRouter's real classified traffic, tracked daily. Shares are a fraction of classified traffic for this task only - the unclassified bucket is excluded, so figures may not sum to 100%.

This ranks by measured usage volume for this specific task, not by model capability. High-cost frontier models (e.g. Claude Opus, GPT-5.6 Sol) can be strong at classification but still not appear here - they're used at far lower volume than cheap, high-throughput models for bulk, cost-sensitive tasks like this one, which is a real pattern in the traffic data, not a quality verdict. The Quality column above (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, where published) is the independent capability signal to weigh against usage share.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AI model for classification?

As of August 9, 2026, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 leads classification with 15% of classified production usage for this task on OpenRouter - real developer adoption for this specific task, not a benchmark opinion.

Is classification usage concentrated among a few models?

The top 3 models account for 33% of classified classification usage across 9 tracked models.

Source: OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/rankings), as of August 9, 2026.

Benchmark scores: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai) via OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/rankings).

Methodology: smophy.ai/benchmark/methodology

Token counts originate from each provider's own tokenizer and are not directly comparable across providers.