Most powerful LLMs (Large Language Models) in 2025

[Last updated: Sep. 2025]

The LLMs (Large Language Models) underneath the hood of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Cursor, and other generative AI tools are the main tech your company needs to understand.

LLMs make chatbots possible (internal and customer-facing), can assist in increasing coding efficiency, and are the driving force behind why Nvidia exploded into the most valuable company in the world. 

Model size, context window size, performance, cost, and availability of these LLMs determine what you can build and how expensive it is to run. 

Here are the important stats (context window, availability, pricing, etc.) for the most powerful LLMs available.

LLMs (Large Language Models) for enterprise systems

OpenAI LLMs

ChatGPT and OpenAI are household names when it comes to large language models (LLMs). They started the generative AI firestorm with $10 billion in Microsoft funding and their GPT models have been at the top of the best LLMs available ever since.

With the August 2025 release of GPT-5, OpenAI has introduced unified reasoning capabilities and significantly improved performance across all domains.

Context window notes:

• API access: All GPT-5 models support up to 400,000 tokens (w/ 128K output)
• ChatGPT interface: Context varies by subscription tier:
  • Free tier: 8,000 tokens per conversation
  • Plus tier: 32,000 tokens per conversation
  • Pro/enterprise tiers: 128,000 tokens per conversation
• Reasoning token support: GPT-5-Codex includes reasoning tokens in its output allocation

Availability:

• GPT-5: Available to all ChatGPT users (Free, Plus, Pro, Team, Enterprise)
• GPT-5 Pro: Extended reasoning version available to Pro and Team users
• API access: All variants available via OpenAI API platform
• Enterprise integration: Available through Microsoft Copilot and enterprise partnerships

Anthropic LLMs

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI VPs who wanted to prioritize safety and reliability in AI models. They moved slower than OpenAI but their Claude 3 family of LLMs were the first to take the crown from OpenAI GPT-4 on the leaderboards in early 2024.

Anthropic followed up with their groundbreaking Claude 4 family, including Claude 4 Opus and Claude 4 Sonnet for advanced coding tasks and reliable enterprise tools. 

In August 2025, they released Claude Opus 4.1 and upgraded Claude Sonnet 4 with a 1 million token context window.

Google LLMs

Google was notoriously far behind on commercial LLMs – even though a Google team developed the revolutionary transformer technology that makes LLMs possible.

They've since not only caught up but established leadership in multimodal AI with their Gemini family. The current Gemini models represent the state-of-the-art in thinking models, with Gemini 2.5 Pro leading common benchmarks by significant margins and debuting at #1 on LMArena.

Google's strategic advantage lies in their comprehensive ecosystem: all current Gemini models feature 1-million token context windows, native multimodal processing (text, image, audio, video), and built-in tool integration with Google Search and code execution.

Mistral LLMs

Mistral AI is a leading French AI company specializing in developing cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) designed for efficiency, performance, and accessibility. With a strong commitment to open-source innovation and affordable premium offerings, Mistral AI has positioned itself as a leading provider in the AI ecosystem, catering to both enterprise and community-driven use cases.

Best LLMs for coding & software development

These LLMs solve complex problems and deliver code that can be used to build production applications faster – not just vibe code a prototype. 

Open source LLMs for enterprise

DeepSeek Open Source LLMs 

DeepSeek shocked the AI community in 2025 by releasing the open-source model DeepSeek-R1, which demonstrated competitive performance against leading proprietary frontier models, challenging the traditional dominance of closed-source solutions. 

Because of development in China and assertions from OpenAI, DeepSeek has some large security risks to account for before using for enterprise.

Nvidia Open Source LLMs

Nvidia is known for their GPUs but they have a whole enterprise AI ecosystem – from dev tools to their NIM microservices platform. They had early entries into LLM space with ChatRTX and Starcoder 2 but their most powerful LLM offering is the Nemotron-4 340B model family.

Meta Llama 3 Open Source LLMs

While Meta is commonly known for being a champion of open source in AI, their models are open weights and not true open source according to many. Either way, open weights still means you can run these models locally  – which you can't do with OpenAI LLMs.

Qwen Open Source LLMs

Qwen refers to the LLM family built by Alibaba Cloud.  Qwen2 has generally surpassed most open source models and demonstrated competitiveness against proprietary models across a series of benchmarks targeting for language understanding, language generation, multilingual capability, coding, mathematics, reasoning, etc.

Mistral AI Open Source LLMs

Mistral AI  has positioned itself as a leading provider in the AI ecosystem, catering to both enterprise and community-driven use cases.

How do I hire a senior AI development team that knows LLMs?

You could spend the next 6-18 months planning to recruit and build an AI team that knows LLMs. Or you could engage Codingscape. 

We can assemble a senior AI development team for you in 4-6 weeks. It’ll be faster to get started, more cost-efficient than internal hiring, and we’ll deliver high-quality results quickly.

Zappos, Twilio, and Veho are just a few companies that trust us to build their software and systems with a remote-first approach.

You can schedule a time to talk with us here. No hassle, no expectations, just answers.