March 2026 brought major updates to the Arena leaderboard, including new rankings across document, video, text, and code models. In this monthly roundup, we break down the best AI models, latest LLM benchmarks, and key trends shaping AI evaluation.
AI failures like hallucinations are well documented. A less examined problem is that models will accept nonsensical premises without question and produce confident, detailed answers to questions that have no valid answer. BullshitBench measures whether models challenge broken premises or play along. We tested over 80 models from all major providers. Clear pushback rates range from 2% to 91%.
Arena’s Academic Partnerships Program provides funding and support for independent research advancing the scientific foundations of AI evaluation.
We’re excited to share a major milestone in LMArena’s journey. We’ve raised $150M of Series A funding led by Felicis and UC Investments (University of California), with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Laude Ventures.
Since launching the platform, developing a rigorous and scientifically grounded evaluation methodology has been central to our mission. A key component of this effort is providing proper statistical uncertainty quantification for model scores and rankings. To that end, we have always reported confidence intervals alongside Arena scores and surfaced any ties in the rankings that those intervals imply.
Introducing Code Arena: live evals for agentic coding in the real world
Today, we’re introducing a commercial product: AI Evaluations. This service offers enterprises, model labs, and developers comprehensive evaluation services grounded in real-world human feedback, showing how models actually perform in practice.
“Nano-Banana” is the codename that was used on LMArena during testing for what is now known as: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. Try it for yourself directly on LMArena.ai
At LMArena, everything starts with the community. There have been a lot of new members joining us in the past few months so we thought it would be a good time to reintroduce ourselves!
About a month ago, we announced that LMArena was becoming a company to better support our growing community platform. As we take this next step, we're staying true to our original mission of rigorous, neutral, and community-driven evaluations.
To date, the community has evaluated over 400+ public models on LMArena as well as 300+ pre-release tests. Tens of millions of battle pairings have been served to users across the world, and each vote has shaped real-world AI performance and development. Around this time two years ago, the community helped us publish our very first leaderboard rankings
