Top picks for Contract Review (2026)
Identifying risk terms in business contracts. Ranked from 334 live models on the OpenRouter catalog, weighted for reasoning quality, context window, structured output.
| # | Model | Score | In / 1M | Out / 1M | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.7anthropic/claude-opus-4.7 | 197 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1,000,000 | Details → |
| 2 | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6 | 197 | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1,000,000 | Details → |
| 3 | OpenAI: GPT-5.4openai/gpt-5.4 | 187 | $2.50 | $15.00 | 1,050,000 | Details → |
| 4 | Z.ai: GLM 5.2z-ai/glm-5.2 | 185 | $0.98 | $3.08 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 5 | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8anthropic/claude-opus-4.8 | 185 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1,000,000 | Details → |
| 6 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Prodeepseek/deepseek-v4-pro | 183 | $0.43 | $0.87 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 7 | OpenAI: GPT-5.5openai/gpt-5.5 | 182 | $5.00 | $30.00 | 1,050,000 | Details → |
| 8 | Google: Gemini 3.1 Pro Previewgoogle/gemini-3.1-pro-preview | 181 | $2.00 | $12.00 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 9 | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flashdeepseek/deepseek-v4-flash | 180 | $0.09 | $0.18 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 10 | Google: Gemini 3.5 Flashgoogle/gemini-3.5-flash | 174 | $1.50 | $9.00 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 11 | MoonshotAI: Kimi K2.6moonshotai/kimi-k2.6 | 173 | $0.66 | $3.41 | 262,144 | Details → |
| 12 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3minimax/minimax-m3 | 171 | $0.30 | $1.20 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 13 | Xiaomi: MiMo-V2.5-Proxiaomi/mimo-v2.5-pro | 169 | $0.43 | $0.87 | 1,048,576 | Details → |
| 14 | Qwen: Qwen3.7 Maxqwen/qwen3.7-max | 169 | $1.25 | $3.75 | 1,000,000 | Details → |
| 15 | OpenAI: GPT-5.4 Miniopenai/gpt-5.4-mini | 169 | $0.75 | $4.50 | 400,000 | Details → |
How we ranked these
For Contract Review, we weight models on reasoning quality, context window, structured output. Scores combine each model's public specs with independent benchmark results (Aider Polyglot coding scores, Artificial Analysis intelligence/coding/agentic indices) and live pricing. See full methodology →
About Contract Review
Contract review is the process of scanning business agreements to flag legal and commercial risks before signing. You need this task when you're evaluating NDAs, service agreements, licensing deals, or vendor contracts and lack in-house legal resources to review every clause manually. Good models excel at spotting unfavorable payment terms, liability caps, termination clauses, and IP ownership gaps, then prioritizing them by severity. Weak models miss nuanced risk signals buried in boilerplate or generate false positives that waste your legal team's time. The key trade-off: faster initial screening reduces review cycles from days to hours, but you still need qualified legal review on flagged risks before signing anything material. Claude and GPT-4 handle this best when given explicit risk frameworks upfront rather than open-ended summaries.
When to use: Use this when you need to screen vendor contracts, employment agreements, or partnership deals quickly before escalating them to legal counsel, or when you want a structured checklist of risks flagged by category.
Common questions
What is the difference between AI contract review and full legal review?
AI contract review flags potential risk areas and extracts key terms for human lawyers to evaluate; it does not provide legal advice or catch every jurisdiction-specific issue. AI tools excel at speed and consistency but still require a qualified attorney to assess enforceability, liability exposure, and negotiation strategy before signing material agreements.
How much faster is AI contract review compared to manual review?
AI models can produce initial risk summaries in seconds to minutes versus hours of lawyer time, reducing the pre-legal-review screening phase by 80-90%. However, total contract closure time depends on negotiation cycles and legal sign-off, which AI cannot accelerate.