AI Knowledge Cutoff Tracker
The moment each frontier model stopped learning. Useful before asking it about recent events, or before assuming it knows about something that shipped last month.
| Tools | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4 | xAI | Jan 2026 3 months ago | Mar 2026 | 1 mo | Web searchTools |
| Grok 4 Mini | xAI | Jan 2026 3 months ago | Mar 2026 | 1 mo | Web searchTools |
| Claude 4.7 Opus | Anthropic | Oct 2025 6 months ago | Apr 2026 | 6 mo | Web searchTools |
| Qwen 3 Max | Alibaba | Oct 2025 6 months ago | Feb 2026 | 3 mo | Tools |
| GPT-5 | OpenAI | Sep 2025 7 months ago | Dec 2025 | 2 mo | Web searchTools |
| GPT-5 Mini | OpenAI | Sep 2025 7 months ago | Dec 2025 | 2 mo | Web searchTools |
| Gemini 3 Pro | Sep 2025 7 months ago | Jan 2026 | 4 mo | Web searchTools | |
| Gemini 3 Flash | Sep 2025 7 months ago | Jan 2026 | 4 mo | Web searchTools | |
| Gemini 3 Flash Lite | Sep 2025 7 months ago | Jan 2026 | 4 mo | Tools | |
| DeepSeek R2 | DeepSeek | Sep 2025 7 months ago | Apr 2026 | 6 mo | |
| Claude 4.6 Sonnet | Anthropic | Aug 2025 8 months ago | Feb 2026 | 6 mo | Web searchTools |
| DeepSeek V4 | DeepSeek | Jul 2025 9 months ago | Feb 2026 | 7 mo | Tools |
| Mistral Large 3 | Mistral | Jun 2025 10 months ago | Nov 2025 | 5 mo | Tools |
| Claude 4.5 Haiku | Anthropic | Apr 2025 12 months ago | Oct 2025 | 5 mo | Tools |
| GPT-4.1 | OpenAI | Dec 2024 16 months ago | Apr 2025 | 4 mo | Web searchTools |
| Llama 4 405B | Meta | Dec 2024 16 months ago | Sep 2025 | 9 mo | Tools |
| o3 (reasoning) | OpenAI | Oct 2024 18 months ago | Apr 2025 | 6 mo | Web searchTools |
| o3 Mini | OpenAI | Sep 2024 19 months ago | Jan 2025 | 4 mo | Web searchTools |
Cutoff dates are as published by each provider in their official model documentation. Some models have a partial cutoff (e.g., common-crawl through one date, news feed through another); we list the latest general cutoff. Models with native web search can answer about events after their cutoff date; models without it cannot.
Why this matters
Most hallucinations builders see in production aren't the model making things up. They're the model answering a question about an event that happened after its cutoff, doing its best, and getting it wrong. Knowing the cutoff date tells you when to require retrieval and when the model can answer unaided.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI model's knowledge cutoff?
The knowledge cutoff is the most recent date for which a model has information baked into its weights from training data. Anything that happened after the cutoff is unknown to the model unless it can retrieve information via web search or another tool.
Why is there a gap between cutoff and release?
Training a frontier model takes weeks to months on massive GPU clusters. The cutoff date is when the training data was assembled; the release date is months later, after training, safety evaluation, red-teaming, and gradual rollout. The average gap across frontier models is roughly five months.
How do I check if a model knows about a recent event?
Compare the event date to the cutoff date in the table above. If the event happened after the cutoff, the model only knows about it if it was given web search or retrieval as a tool. You can also ask the model directly: 'What's your training data cutoff?' — most models will tell you accurately.
Why do some models with the same cutoff date have different release dates?
Model family releases (e.g., Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash) are often trained from the same base data but go through different fine-tuning, alignment, and evaluation tracks. They get a coordinated release because they share architecture, but the smaller model is usually ready first.
Which models can answer about events after their cutoff?
Any model with native web search can: this includes ChatGPT, Claude (via Claude's web search), Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity. Models without native web search (DeepSeek, Mistral, most open-source) need to be wrapped in a retrieval system to answer about post-cutoff events.
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