Best AI for long documents
As of 2026-07-18, Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 (Fast) is the strongest model for this task in our daily benchmark, where over 350 AI models are evaluated and the best are presented.
Reading an 80-page report and pulling out what matters is among the most profitable things AI does. But long documents are also where models lose the most: information in the middle of the text is systematically deprioritised.
For long documents we rank by overall score, which captures both comprehension and precision. Ranked by overall score, from today’s benchmark.
Today’s ranking
| Model | Provider | Score | Language | Speed | Input price/1M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 (Fast) | anthropic | 8.3/10 | 9.3/10 | 131 t/s | $10.00 |
| Anthropic: Claude Haiku 4.5 | anthropic | 8.0/10 | 9.3/10 | 113 t/s | $1.00 |
| Google: Gemma 3 4B | 8.0/10 | 9.3/10 | 237 t/s | $0.05 | |
| Mistral: Mistral Small 3 | mistralai | 7.8/10 | 8.7/10 | 234 t/s | $0.05 |
| Perplexity: Sonar Pro | perplexity | 7.7/10 | 9.0/10 | 68 t/s | $3.00 |
| Cohere: Command R+ (08-2024) | cohere | 7.5/10 | 9.3/10 | 160 t/s | $2.50 |
| Meta: Llama 4 Maverick | meta-llama | 7.2/10 | 8.0/10 | 176 t/s | $0.20 |
| Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash | 7.2/10 | 8.0/10 | 419 t/s | $1.50 |
A context window is not the same as understanding
That a model accepts a million tokens does not mean it uses all of them equally well. In practice models remember the beginning and the end best, while the middle fades. So ask specific questions — “what does it say about the notice period?” — instead of requesting a general summary of the whole document.
Ask for page references
Require the model to state where in the document each answer came from. Then you can verify a claim in seconds and quickly spot anything invented. Without references you are relying on it having remembered correctly.
Frequently asked questions
Other tasks
Doing something else? See which model is best for it.
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