Closed AI models dominate the price-performance frontier

Village's LLM Atlas finds closed models hold almost every budget on the price-performance frontier, with open-weight models the best buy at only 3% of budgets, the lowest share measured, down from 41% in June. DeepSeek V4 Flash and Zhipu's GLM-5.2 once led large budget bands, but OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna and GPT-6.1 Terra and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 reclaimed them. The piece attributes the shift to closed labs distilling their own frontier models, releasing full model families, and serving inference at greater scale.