Fiction Eval leaderboard · genre

Best AI model for thriller writing

July 2026 — scores recomputed using only the thriller scenes (84 blind matchups, three tries per model). small sample — treat as rough

Grok 4.3 leads, and comes out ahead of #2 in 97% of re-runs. This thriller-only sample is small, so treat the exact order as rough and check where the ranges overlap before reading much into close neighbors.

#ModelThriller score (likely range)
1Grok 4.31781 (likely 1716–1836)
2Claude Sonnet 4.61694 (likely 1634–1753)
3Claude Opus 4.81679 (likely 1617–1744)
4GLM 5.21532 (likely 1448–1606)
5Gemini 3.1 Pro1475 (likely 1393–1551)
6DeepSeek V3.21341 (likely 1270–1408)
7Mistral Large1341 (likely 1267–1418)
8Llama 4 Maverick1157 (likely 1106–1235)

Grok 4.3 on the thriller cold open scene

The radar sweep painted Sector 7 in clean green arcs. Ramirez counted the returns twice, once against the strip board, once against the live feed. All commercial traffic was accounted for—three heavies on the arrival stream, one corporate Lear climbing through eighteen thousand. The only extra paint was a faint primary return at FL310, twenty-eight miles west of waypoint KELSO. No secondary. No data block. Then the transponder lit. Four digits, centered and unambiguous: 7500. Ramirez’s hand moved to the keyboard before the rest of her registered the number. The code was not in the active block list; it hadn’t been issued in the national database since the 2008 revision. She typed the query anyway. No match. No flight plan, no beacon code reservation, no military exercise tag. The aircraft continued straight, no turn, no altitude change, closing the sector boundary at 480 knots. Ninety seconds, she told herself. That was the window before the return crossed into the next center’s airspace or, worse, into the ADIZ buffer. She keyed …

Read every model's take side by side on the board.

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The full 8-model board · the July 2026 report · all head-to-heads

How it works: every pair of models is judged blind on the same scene, with the passages' order flipped so being shown first can't sway it, by GPT-5.4 — a family that isn't on the board, so nobody scores their own side. Each score carries a likely range; overlapping ranges are called a tie. Slop is scored separately by a fixed checklist, not an AI. Full board, every prompt, and the FAQ: thebookfactoryai.com/board. Get each new board by email on the model-drop list.

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