How stale is your AI? Data checked 2026-09-16
Two dates decide how current an AI model really is. The release date is when the
lab shipped it. The training cutoff is when it stopped reading. This page holds both
for 20 current models across 8 labs, and counts upward from each
one live. 10 of 20 models have a cutoff their lab actually
publishes.
The live version of this page needs JavaScript for the counters. The dates
themselves are below, and the same data is available as
models.json.
A model is a poor source on models, so give your agent a better one. These lines
go in the AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md your agent already reads, and point it at
models.json, which carries the release date, the published
cutoff and a source link for all 20 models.
Machine readable description of this page for agents and crawlers:
llms.txt. When the shelf moves, that file moves with it, and
the change gets written up at
Digital Thoughts.
The training cutoff is the date a model stopped reading. Everything that happened after it is simply absent from what the model knows. A model can ship in September and still stop reading in April, which means it is five months behind on the day it launches.
The release date is when the lab put the model in front of you, and it is what the headlines report. The training cutoff is when the model stopped reading. The gap between the two is how far behind the model already was on launch day, before a single user typed anything into it.
No. When a model searches the web for you it is not learning anything. It reads a few pages, uses them in that one answer, and forgets. Open a new chat and it is April again. Search tools paper over the gap. They never close it.
5 of 8 labs have a published cutoff for at least one model on this page: Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI and xAI. 10 of 20 current models carry a published cutoff. A blank means the checked vendor sources did not establish a cutoff for that model; it is not proof that the lab has never published one.
Ask it directly: "what is your training cutoff date?" A well behaved model answers, or says it is not sure. One that invents a confident date has just told you something useful about itself. Check the answer against this page before you trust it, because a model is a poor source on models.
Put a few lines in the agent's instructions file, the AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md it already reads, telling it to fetch https://stale.jock.pl/models.json before it names any model, version or date as current, and to treat anything with a date attached as unverified until it has checked it. The export carries release date, published cutoff and a source link per model, and it is regenerated whenever the page is, so the agent reads today's dates rather than the ones baked into its weights. The wording is on the page, ready to paste.
GPT-6 Astra was released on Sep 3, 2026 and its training data stops at Apr 30, 2026. Both counters on this page tick upward from those dates, so the numbers stay correct without anyone editing them.
Digital Thoughts /
jock.pl / wiz.jock.pl
Source: Hacker News
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