OpenArt Introduces OpenArt Arena, a New AI Model Benchmark Tailor-Made for and by Creatives

The new leaderboard levels the playing field for creators, filmmakers, animators, and other creatives of all skill levels in choosing the most appropriate AI video and image models to uplevel their work

• OpenArt Arena will be the first leaderboard based on the expert evaluations of top creatives across multiple industries, including film/TV, advertising, and creator, through blind evaluations designed around the creative criteria that matter most

San Francisco, CA – September 15, 2026 – OpenArt AI, the all-in-one AI creative platform and AI video generator that is changing the way visual stories are told for over 8 million monthly active users, today announced OpenArt Arena, a new AI image and video model leaderboard and benchmark built for and by the creative communities that are increasingly using AI to supercharge their work. The goal of OpenArt Arena is to become a brain trust for the creative community and make the use of AI more accessible and less daunting for all creatives, from AI neophyte to expert. While existing benchmarks generally aren’t organized around creative workflows, OpenArt Arena is designed to better serve the needs of creatives such as filmmakers, advertisers, creators, and storytellers of all kinds as the first leaderboard based on expert-led, task-specific evaluation. OpenArt Arena is available at openart.ai/arena.

“OpenArt sees firsthand how creators seek trusted resources for determining which AI models are best suited for specific creative tasks,” said Coco Mao, CEO and Co-founder of OpenArt. “As the pace of innovation accelerates, creators should not have to rely solely on technical benchmarks to make decisions about the tools that shape their work. OpenArt Arena is designed to fill that gap, bringing the perspectives of experienced practitioners and the creative community together to help people make more informed decisions about the AI tools they use every day.”

To develop the leaderboard, OpenArt is bringing together a “Creative Expert Council” of industry leaders, experienced practitioners, educators, and creative AI specialists, alongside a broader group of “tastemakers,” who are among the top users and creators on the OpenArt platform. Notable names include Emmy-winning animation director and creator William Lau; creative technologist Willonius “King Willonius” Hatcher; marketing leader David Shing “Shingy”; co-founders of The Monster Library Mark Monroe and Kevin Van Witt; founders of the creative community Machine Cinema Minh Do and Fred Grinstein; Global SVP, Group Executive Producer - AI, Edelman and lecturer at UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television Gabe Michael; and more.

The leaderboard will have category-specific rankings for industries such as advertising and marketing, filmmaking, graphic design, animation, and more. Rather than assigning one broad technical score to each model, the experts, spanning these categories, will take part in blind, side-by-side evaluations of unlabeled model outputs, selecting the result that best fulfills a specific creative brief and the criteria most relevant to that use case and category. Participants will evaluate models through the criteria creative professionals care about most, including aesthetics, prompt adherence, realism, motion quality, and more. By focusing on direct comparisons instead of asking judges to assign subjective scores in isolation, OpenArt Arena is designed to reflect how creative professionals actually assess work in real-world settings.

OpenArt developed the evaluation framework in close consultation with industry practitioners to ensure each benchmark reflects the standards and priorities of its various creative disciplines. OpenArt aims to update the OpenArt Arena regularly as models frequently evolve and new solutions enter the mix. Rankings are calculated from aggregated blind, pairwise evaluations using a Bradley–Terry statistical model.[OpenArt to confirm any more methodology details we can include and confirm how often the leaderboard will be updated].

The launch of OpenArt Arena comes amid significant company momentum for OpenArt, including the June launch of Director, the company’s new visual storytelling tool that introduces “vibe directing,” allowing users of all skill levels to create cinematic videos through conversation alone. This summer, OpenArt was also announced as part of the 2026 Disney Accelerator program.

For more information on OpenArt, OpenArt Arena, and its Director offering, visit openart.ai.

About OpenArt

OpenArt is an AI creative platform used by millions of creators to bring their visual stories to life. Founded by ex-Google engineers and based in San Francisco, OpenArt grew revenue 7x in 2025 and ARR has surpassed $100M. In June 2026, OpenArt launched the game-changing Director, a revolutionary new agentic tool that lets anyone create a complete, cinematic-quality video through conversation alone. The launch introduces a new creative era that the company is calling “Vibe Directing” – just as “vibe coding” changed how we build software, “Vibe Directing” is poised to do the same for video creation.