What AI model does it use?

What AI model does Lovable use?

Lovable builds web apps from a chat, and people ask which model does the building. There's a gap in the answer, because Lovable doesn't let you pick and doesn't publish a single name. What it does publish is a changelog, and every builder upgrade in it is a Claude model.

The builder: Claude Opus, picked for you

Lovable's FAQ answers the question directly, and the answer is no: "Lovable manages the underlying model used by the agent in Build mode and Plan mode. The agent runs on current frontier models, and Lovable rolls out model upgrades automatically to all users, so there is no setting to switch the agent between specific models."

The changelog fills in the names. It's a steady line of Anthropic's biggest model:

Notice the verb. Lovable says it "incorporates" these models, and the first entry says Opus 4.5 handles "core parts" of the agent. That leaves room for other models doing other steps, and Lovable doesn't break it down. So Claude Opus 5 is the model Lovable has named, and there may be others alongside it.

Your app's AI features: Gemini by default

This is where the Gemini answer people give comes from. When the app you build needs its own AI (a chatbot, image generation, search over documents), Lovable wires in models through its AI connector, and those are a different set. On September 8, 2026 the changelog named "Gemini 3.8 Flash, the new default chat model", and GPT-6 Astra joined the list the same day.

Claude arrived there later. On September 23, 2026 Lovable wrote that "Your app's AI features can now use Anthropic's Claude models, with no Anthropic account or API key," for apps created from May 13, 2026 onward.

Lovable's AI features page draws the line itself: these models "are not the models Lovable uses to write, edit, or reason about your code." Plenty of answers online mix the two up; that sentence settles it.

What Lovable doesn't publish

There's no per-mode breakdown (Build, Plan and Chat could differ), no statement on whether plan tier changes the model, and no list of anything besides Claude in the builder. The changelog is the best guide, and it's updated often enough that the monthly re-read behind this page watches it.