Frontier Model
The current-generation top-tier foundation models — GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 in 2026. Distinguished by superior capability at the cost of latency and per-token price. Also the term used by AI safety regulators (UK AI Safety Institute, US AI Safety Institute) to scope which models fall under enhanced review.
Related terms
- Foundation Model
A large pre-trained model (LLM, vision, or multimodal) intended as a general-purpose substrate that downstream apps consume via prompting, fine-tuning, or agent scaffolding. Under the EU AI Act these are General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models and their providers carry specific obligations.
- Reasoning Model
A class of LLMs (OpenAI o-series, Claude with extended thinking, DeepSeek-R1) trained to spend significant inference-time compute on internal reasoning before producing the final answer. Substantially better on math, coding, and multi-step problems at the cost of higher latency and token consumption.
Related on this site
Where this fits
Frontier Model is part of the AI Fundamentals vocabulary used in the Generative AI Maturity Framework. See the full glossary for the complete set of 149 defined terms, or take the free maturity assessment to see where your organisation stands.