We’re solidly in a three‑horse race at the top: Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI o‑series, Anthropic Claude 3.7+.

The gap between #1 and #2 is slim, so pricing, latency, and policy alignment should weigh more heavily than a couple of benchmark points.

Specialists matter: if your stack leans on long‑context RAG, o3‑high may edge out; for multilingual safety‑critical chat, Claude might still be your best pick.