About Cost Curves
Where the idea came from
In his video “Anthropic Actually Fixed Opus”, Theo (t3.gg) showed a chart that drew each model’s reasoning-effort levels as one curve of Intelligence Index against cost per task. It made the trade-off between paying more and getting a smarter answer easy to see. We built this site on that idea. The Curves view is that chart, and the Leaderboard ranks the same models by score, with cost as a budget you set.
The data
Every number here comes from Artificial Analysis, through their free Data API, and every page credits them. We fetch it every four hours. If a fetch fails or looks wrong, we keep showing the last good copy. The data on the site was last updated .
What the numbers mean
- Intelligence Index
- Artificial Analysis’s combined score across its set of evaluations (version 4.3 in the data shown here). Their methodology page lists what goes into it.
- Coding Index and Agentic Index
- Narrower scores from Artificial Analysis, each an equal-weighted average of the evaluations in its area. Their capability indices page defines both.
- Cost per task
- What Artificial Analysis measured it cost, in US dollars, to run one Intelligence Index task at that setting. We use the same cost beside Coding and Agentic scores, so a setting costs the same whichever score you rank by.
- Effort level
- Many models let you choose how much they reason before they answer, usually named low, medium, high, xhigh or max. Artificial Analysis tests each setting as its own entry. We join the settings of one release into one line, lowest effort first. More effort usually scores higher and costs more.
- Why some models have fewer levels
- A model shows only the settings its maker offers and Artificial Analysis has tested. A model with one setting is a single dot.
- Why new models can lack Coding or Agentic scores
- The newest releases can have an Intelligence Index score before Artificial Analysis publishes their Coding or Agentic scores. Until it does, we list them as not yet scored, never as zero.
Independence
This site is independent. It is not affiliated with Artificial Analysis, or with Theo or t3.gg.