What's the best AI model for OpenClaw?
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There's a question we all ask when setting up @OpenClaw: which model should I actually use?
What are your suggestions? Any preferences?
The "best" model definitely depends on your workflows and priorities. High success rate, fast completions, or cost efficient? For coding tasks, there's this thread [1] suggesting @Claude by Anthropic, @Gemini, and @OpenAI's GPT models, while open-weight models like @MiniMax are bridging the gap with every release. [2]
Curious what the community recommends for @OpenClaw?
Note: The poll is inspired by the current leaderboard on pinchbench.com by @KiloClaw
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Replies
ClawSecure
@fmerian Claude Opus 4.6 with extended thinking for everything. Full stop.
We run it across virtually every workflow, coding, security analysis, content, strategy, architecture, all of it. The only exceptions are basic boilerplate and simple admin tasks. The cost premium is worth it because the accuracy and output quality eliminates the rework cycles you'd burn through with cheaper models. You save more in iteration time than you spend on tokens.
We're consistently hitting 95%+ accuracy across tasks, but here's the part nobody talks about: that's not just the model. We've built an extensive custom context memory and state management system that feeds the model exactly what it needs across sessions. Persistent memory, governance documents, project state, lessons learned, all structured and available in every interaction.
This is the biggest gap in how most people use these models. Even Opus 4.6 in extended thinking will underperform if you're starting every conversation from zero with no context, no memory, and no structured state. The model is the engine but the context system is the fuel. Without it, every model, no matter how powerful, is reasoning in a vacuum. The teams investing in memory architecture and context management are getting dramatically better results than teams just picking the "best model" and hoping for the best.
The model matters. How you feed it matters more.
I've been running Opus 4.6 for most work - coding, research, content drafting. The context window handles big projects well and I like how it reasons through multi-step tasks.
For quick one-off stuff I'll sometimes use Sonnet 4.5 to save cost, but when something matters I go back to Opus. The quality gap shows up fast on anything that requires judgment.