Model rankings updated February 2026 based on real usage data.
Tool calls (also known as function calls) give LLMs access to external tools. The LLM suggests which tool to call upon, and your system then executes the tool and provides the results back to the LLM, which formats the response into an answer to the original question. This pattern enables building AI agents, automated workflows, and intelligent systems that can query databases, call external APIs, and take action in the real world. OpenRouter standardizes the tool calling interface across models and providers, making it easy to integrate external tools with any supported model. These LLMs are the most popular models on OpenRouter with tool calling capabilities.
Based on top weekly usage data from millions of users accessing AI models for tool calling through OpenRouter.
MiniMax-M2.5 is a SOTA large language model designed for real-world productivity. Trained in a diverse range of complex real-world digital working environments, M2.5 builds upon the coding expertise of M2.1 to extend into general office work, reaching fluency in generating and operating Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files, context switching between diverse software environments, and working across different agent and human teams. Scoring 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified, 51.3% on Multi-SWE-Bench, and 76.3% on BrowseComp, M2.5 is also more token efficient than previous generations, having been trained to optimize its actions and output through planning.
Gemini 3 Flash Preview is a high speed, high value thinking model designed for agentic workflows, multi turn chat, and coding assistance. It delivers near Pro level reasoning and tool use performance with substantially lower latency than larger Gemini variants, making it well suited for interactive development, long running agent loops, and collaborative coding tasks. Compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash, it provides broad quality improvements across reasoning, multimodal understanding, and reliability.
The model supports a 1M token context window and multimodal inputs including text, images, audio, video, and PDFs, with text output. It includes configurable reasoning via thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, high), structured output, tool use, and automatic context caching. Gemini 3 Flash Preview is optimized for users who want strong reasoning and agentic behavior without the cost or latency of full scale frontier models.

DeepSeek-V3.2 is a large language model designed to harmonize high computational efficiency with strong reasoning and agentic tool-use performance. It introduces DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), a fine-grained sparse attention mechanism that reduces training and inference cost while preserving quality in long-context scenarios. A scalable reinforcement learning post-training framework further improves reasoning, with reported performance in the GPT-5 class, and the model has demonstrated gold-medal results on the 2025 IMO and IOI. V3.2 also uses a large-scale agentic task synthesis pipeline to better integrate reasoning into tool-use settings, boosting compliance and generalization in interactive environments.
Users can control the reasoning behaviour with the reasoning enabled boolean. Learn more in our docs
Grok 4.1 Fast is xAI's best agentic tool calling model that shines in real-world use cases like customer support and deep research. 2M context window.
Reasoning can be enabled/disabled using the reasoning enabled parameter in the API. Learn more in our docs
GLM-5 is Z.ai’s flagship open-source foundation model engineered for complex systems design and long-horizon agent workflows. Built for expert developers, it delivers production-grade performance on large-scale programming tasks, rivaling leading closed-source models. With advanced agentic planning, deep backend reasoning, and iterative self-correction, GLM-5 moves beyond code generation to full-system construction and autonomous execution.
Kimi K2.5 is Moonshot AI's native multimodal model, delivering state-of-the-art visual coding capability and a self-directed agent swarm paradigm. Built on Kimi K2 with continued pretraining over approximately 15T mixed visual and text tokens, it delivers strong performance in general reasoning, visual coding, and agentic tool-calling.
Opus 4.6 is Anthropic’s strongest model for coding and long-running professional tasks. It is built for agents that operate across entire workflows rather than single prompts, making it especially effective for large codebases, complex refactors, and multi-step debugging that unfolds over time. The model shows deeper contextual understanding, stronger problem decomposition, and greater reliability on hard engineering tasks than prior generations.
Beyond coding, Opus 4.6 excels at sustained knowledge work. It produces near-production-ready documents, plans, and analyses in a single pass, and maintains coherence across very long outputs and extended sessions. This makes it a strong default for tasks that require persistence, judgment, and follow-through, such as technical design, migration planning, and end-to-end project execution.
For users upgrading from earlier Opus versions, see our official migration guide here
Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model yet, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It excels at iterative development, complex codebase navigation, end-to-end project management with memory, polished document creation, and confident computer use for web QA and workflow automation.
Trinity-Large-Preview is a frontier-scale open-weight language model from Arcee, built as a 400B-parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts with 13B active parameters per token using 4-of-256 expert routing.
It excels in creative writing, storytelling, role-play, chat scenarios, and real-time voice assistance, better than your average reasoning model usually can. But we’re also introducing some of our newer agentic performance. It was trained to navigate well in agent harnesses like OpenCode, Cline, and Kilo Code, and to handle complex toolchains and long, constraint-filled prompts.
The architecture natively supports very long context windows up to 512k tokens, with the Preview API currently served at 128k context using 8-bit quantization for practical deployment. Trinity-Large-Preview reflects Arcee’s efficiency-first design philosophy, offering a production-oriented frontier model with open weights and permissive licensing suitable for real-world applications and experimentation.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic’s most advanced Sonnet model to date, optimized for real-world agents and coding workflows. It delivers state-of-the-art performance on coding benchmarks such as SWE-bench Verified, with improvements across system design, code security, and specification adherence. The model is designed for extended autonomous operation, maintaining task continuity across sessions and providing fact-based progress tracking.
Sonnet 4.5 also introduces stronger agentic capabilities, including improved tool orchestration, speculative parallel execution, and more efficient context and memory management. With enhanced context tracking and awareness of token usage across tool calls, it is particularly well-suited for multi-context and long-running workflows. Use cases span software engineering, cybersecurity, financial analysis, research agents, and other domains requiring sustained reasoning and tool use.
Gemini 2.5 Flash is Google's state-of-the-art workhorse model, specifically designed for advanced reasoning, coding, mathematics, and scientific tasks. It includes built-in "thinking" capabilities, enabling it to provide responses with greater accuracy and nuanced context handling.
Additionally, Gemini 2.5 Flash is configurable through the "max tokens for reasoning" parameter, as described in the documentation (https://openrouter.ai/docs/use-cases/reasoning-tokens#max-tokens-for-reasoning).
Step 3.5 Flash is StepFun's most capable open-source foundation model. Built on a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, it selectively activates only 11B of its 196B parameters per token. It is a reasoning model that is incredibly speed efficient even at long contexts.
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is a lightweight reasoning model in the Gemini 2.5 family, optimized for ultra-low latency and cost efficiency. It offers improved throughput, faster token generation, and better performance across common benchmarks compared to earlier Flash models. By default, "thinking" (i.e. multi-pass reasoning) is disabled to prioritize speed, but developers can enable it via the Reasoning API parameter to selectively trade off cost for intelligence.
gpt-oss-120b is an open-weight, 117B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model from OpenAI designed for high-reasoning, agentic, and general-purpose production use cases. It activates 5.1B parameters per forward pass and is optimized to run on a single H100 GPU with native MXFP4 quantization. The model supports configurable reasoning depth, full chain-of-thought access, and native tool use, including function calling, browsing, and structured output generation.
MiniMax-M2.1 is a lightweight, state-of-the-art large language model optimized for coding, agentic workflows, and modern application development. With only 10 billion activated parameters, it delivers a major jump in real-world capability while maintaining exceptional latency, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Compared to its predecessor, M2.1 delivers cleaner, more concise outputs and faster perceived response times. It shows leading multilingual coding performance across major systems and application languages, achieving 49.4% on Multi-SWE-Bench and 72.5% on SWE-Bench Multilingual, and serves as a versatile agent “brain” for IDEs, coding tools, and general-purpose assistance.
To avoid degrading this model's performance, MiniMax highly recommends preserving reasoning between turns. Learn more about using reasoning_details to pass back reasoning in our docs.
GPT-5.2 is the latest frontier-grade model in the GPT-5 series, offering stronger agentic and long context perfomance compared to GPT-5.1. It uses adaptive reasoning to allocate computation dynamically, responding quickly to simple queries while spending more depth on complex tasks.
Built for broad task coverage, GPT-5.2 delivers consistent gains across math, coding, sciende, and tool calling workloads, with more coherent long-form answers and improved tool-use reliability.
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is Google’s frontier reasoning model, delivering enhanced software engineering performance, improved agentic reliability, and more efficient token usage across complex workflows. Building on the multimodal foundation of the Gemini 3 series, it combines high-precision reasoning across text, image, video, audio, and code with a 1M-token context window. Reasoning Details must be preserved when using multi-turn tool calling, see our docs here: https://openrouter.ai/docs/use-cases/reasoning-tokens#preserving-reasoning. The 3.1 update introduces measurable gains in SWE benchmarks and real-world coding environments, along with stronger autonomous task execution in structured domains such as finance and spreadsheet-based workflows.
Designed for advanced development and agentic systems, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview improves long-horizon stability and tool orchestration while increasing token efficiency. It introduces a new medium thinking level to better balance cost, speed, and performance. The model excels in agentic coding, structured planning, multimodal analysis, and workflow automation, making it well-suited for autonomous agents, financial modeling, spreadsheet automation, and high-context enterprise tasks.
GPT-5-Nano is the smallest and fastest variant in the GPT-5 system, optimized for developer tools, rapid interactions, and ultra-low latency environments. While limited in reasoning depth compared to its larger counterparts, it retains key instruction-following and safety features. It is the successor to GPT-4.1-nano and offers a lightweight option for cost-sensitive or real-time applications.
Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s fastest and most efficient model, delivering near-frontier intelligence at a fraction of the cost and latency of larger Claude models. Matching Claude Sonnet 4’s performance across reasoning, coding, and computer-use tasks, Haiku 4.5 brings frontier-level capability to real-time and high-volume applications.
It introduces extended thinking to the Haiku line; enabling controllable reasoning depth, summarized or interleaved thought output, and tool-assisted workflows with full support for coding, bash, web search, and computer-use tools. Scoring >73% on SWE-bench Verified, Haiku 4.5 ranks among the world’s best coding models while maintaining exceptional responsiveness for sub-agents, parallelized execution, and scaled deployment.
Gemini Flash 2.0 offers a significantly faster time to first token (TTFT) compared to Gemini Flash 1.5, while maintaining quality on par with larger models like Gemini Pro 1.5. It introduces notable enhancements in multimodal understanding, coding capabilities, complex instruction following, and function calling. These advancements come together to deliver more seamless and robust agentic experiences.