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Top picks for Short-Form Summarization (2026)

TL;DRs of articles and emails at scale. Ranked from 352 live models on the OpenRouter catalog, weighted for low latency, low cost, reasoning quality.

What this is A capability-matched shortlist, not a benchmark-tested winner. Models are scored by the fit of their declared specs (structured output, reasoning, context, modality, price) against Short-Form Summarization. Pair with benchmark sources like Artificial Analysis or LMSys Arena before you ship. Full methodology →
#ModelScoreIn / 1MOut / 1MContext
1 Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free)google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free 124 Free Free 262,144 Details →
2 Google: Gemma 4 31B (free)google/gemma-4-31b-it:free 124 Free Free 262,144 Details →
3 Qwen: Qwen3.5-9Bqwen/qwen3.5-9b 124 $0.10 $0.15 262,144 Details →
4 Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it 123 $0.06 $0.33 262,144 Details →
5 Google: Gemma 4 31Bgoogle/gemma-4-31b-it 123 $0.13 $0.38 262,144 Details →
6 ByteDance Seed: Seed-2.0-Minibytedance-seed/seed-2.0-mini 123 $0.10 $0.40 262,144 Details →
7 Qwen: Qwen3.5-Flashqwen/qwen3.5-flash-02-23 123 $0.07 $0.26 1,000,000 Details →
8 ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 Flashbytedance-seed/seed-1.6-flash 123 $0.07 $0.30 262,144 Details →
9 xAI: Grok 4.1 Fastx-ai/grok-4.1-fast 123 $0.20 $0.50 2,000,000 Details →
10 Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Preview 09-2025google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-09-2025 123 $0.10 $0.40 1,048,576 Details →
11 xAI: Grok 4 Fastx-ai/grok-4-fast 123 $0.20 $0.50 2,000,000 Details →
12 OpenAI: GPT-5 Nanoopenai/gpt-5-nano 123 $0.05 $0.40 400,000 Details →
13 Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Litegoogle/gemini-2.5-flash-lite 123 $0.10 $0.40 1,048,576 Details →
14 NVIDIA: Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3Bnvidia/nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b 123 $0.05 $0.20 262,144 Details →
15 Mistral: Mistral Small 4mistralai/mistral-small-2603 123 $0.15 $0.60 262,144 Details →

How we ranked these

For Short-Form Summarization, we weight models on low latency, low cost, reasoning quality. Higher means better. Scores combine each model's public metadata (context length, modality support, tool calling, structured output, reasoning capability) with live pricing. See full methodology →

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