Monthly roundup
April 2026 in AI models
A release-wave summary for readers who want the important changes without pretending every launch is a reason to switch.
The signal
13 tracked releases across 10 providers
Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Moonshot AI, SpaceXAI, Anthropic, Qwen, Meta, Z.ai, Google account for 13 tracked release events. 4 catalogued events link to a detailed comparison profile. 1 launch guide is available for deeper trade-off coverage. There is no single winner because the constraints are different.
At a glance
- Release events
- 13
- Profile links
- 4
What shipped and changed
ReleaseMistral Medium 3.5
Mistral
Mistral docs/changelog record Medium 3.5 on April 28: a 128B dense open-weight model with Modified MIT terms, $1.50/$7.50 API rates and 256K context.
Date note: The legal centre instead lists April 29; the May 22 product article calls it public preview, while the current API card is GA. The checkpoint licence restricts rights above $20M global consolidated company/employer revenue in the preceding month.
Mistral docs changelog
- Limited preview
DeepSeek-V4-Pro
DeepSeek
Date note: April preview checkpoint. The API id `deepseek-v4-pro` was later reused for the 2026-08-13 GA release.
DeepSeek API announcement 
ReleaseKimi K2.6
Moonshot AI
Date note: Weights and tech blog went public 2026-04-20 (Hugging Face README finalised that day); the Kimi Forum announcement is timestamped 2026-04-21 07:01 UTC.
Moonshot AI announcement
