Arena's model routing strategy, Max

There are just too many models and model providers now. Some are concise, others are loved for tone and personality, and picking between them across the full range of day-to-day tasks creates friction, guesswork, and unnecessary slowdown. Arena, the AI model evaluation platform, released Max to reduce that friction and make chat UX feel more unified across models and providers.

Max is not a language model itself. It is a router, or policy layer, orchestrating across multiple frontier models. Arena says it is trained on more than 5 million real-world user preference signals from Battle mode, with the goal of selecting the best model for each prompt, whether that prompt is coding, creative writing, brainstorming, and so on. Max can also switch models mid-chat, so users can shift context without having to restart in a new conversation.

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The results Arena shared are strong: Max reaches 1500 vs 1488 for the next model, and takes the #1 overall spot, with bigger gains in some categories than others. It is also notable that about 68% of routed prompts appear to be handled by just three models, which suggests the advantage may come from smart orchestration of a concentrated top tier.

To me, this feels like a product-layer shift. As models commoditize faster than product teams can ship, orchestration becomes more valuable to both users and teams. The next logical step seems to be personalization: routing that adapts not just to prompt type, but to each user’s preferences over time. We’ll see how that unravels in the future, but I’m excited for it.