Best for: Government / FedRAMP
Ranked on FedRAMP / IL authorization, data sovereignty, and reasoning quality. Certification pillar dominates.
Updated May 2026. Top 3 this month: R1 0528, Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15, DeepSeek V3.
Podium
How we rank
US government and defense workloads require FedRAMP authorization (Moderate or High) and often IL4/IL5. We rank based on availability of authorized endpoints (Azure OpenAI Gov, AWS Bedrock GovCloud, Google Public Sector), then reasoning quality, then price.
Our full methodology is published on the methodology page.
Pillars and weights:
Full ranking
| Rank | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | R1 0528 | DeepSeek | $0.50 | $2.15 | 163,840 |
| 2 | Qwen3.5 Plus 2026-02-15 | Qwen | $0.26 | $1.56 | 1,000,000 |
| 3 | DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | $0.32 | $0.89 | 163,840 |
| 4 | Qwen3.5 397B A17B | Qwen | $0.39 | $2.34 | 262,144 |
| 5 | Hunyuan A13B Instruct | Tencent | $0.14 | $0.57 | 131,072 |
| 6 | MiniMax M2.1 | MiniMax | $0.29 | $0.95 | 196,608 |
| 7 | Trinity Large Preview | Arcee AI | $0.00 | $0.00 | 131,000 |
| 8 | GPT-4o (2024-11-20) | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128,000 |
| 9 | MiniMax-01 | MiniMax | $0.20 | $1.10 | 1,000,192 |
| 10 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1,000,000 |
Field notes
Confirm the exact authorization level (Moderate vs High) matches your program's needs.
Government tenants often trail the public product by 3–6 months.
Build abstraction layers so you can swap models without code changes as authorizations update.
FAQ
The questions teams ask before picking a model for government / fedramp.
Get instant answers from our AI agent
