Models

Mid-tier model

The next-down models from frontier — Claude Sonnet, GPT-5 Mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Mid-tier models are the workhorse of production AI in 2026. They handle 80% of real workloads at a fraction of frontier cost and acceptable latency. Default to mid-tier; promote individual calls to frontier when evals show a quality gap.

Related terms

Frontier model
Model routing

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