Toptal

SAN FRANCISCO – November 10, 2026 -- Toptal has launched Toptal AI, a full-stack AI services company that debuts with more than 200 PhDs in AI-related fields, 100 forward-deployed engineers and 15 new product lines. The unit targets frontier AI labs, enterprises and fast-growing startups.

Toptal AI builds, evaluates and deploys AI using a mix of open-weight and proprietary models. Clients keep full ownership and control of their AI systems and data.

Toptal AI signs 14 technology partners, including Anthropic and OpenAI

The company launches with signed agreements with Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXSI, Gemini, Copilot, Amazon Nova, Databricks, Agentforce, ElevenLabs, Lovable, Miro, Fin, Glean and Writer. Toptal describes the offering as vendor-neutral.

San Francisco – November 06, 2026 -- ExpertCrowd, Toptal's AI model training platform, and Y Combinator-backed HUD have released ExpertCrowd-SWE, a software engineering benchmark that evaluates frontier-grade large language models (LLMs) and coding agents.

Toptal engineers wrote the tasks and grading rubrics

Engineers from Toptal's network of domain experts authored the benchmark's tasks and grading rubrics. HUD's infrastructure then hosted the task-run environments and verified the benchmarks through its internal quality assurance pipelines.

HUD and Toptal AI research teams reviewed the methodology and results. The teams include more than a dozen PhDs and researchers with academic or professional experience at Harvard, EPFL, the University of Liège, DeepMind, Qwen and ByteDance.