Best AI model odds

Which company will have the best AI model at the end of 2026? Polymarket and Kalshi both run markets on it, and both settle on the same public scoreboard: the LMArena text leaderboard, where people vote blind between pairs of model answers. These are the live odds, for the end of the year and the nearer monthly checks.

Best AI model at the end of 2026

Polymarket names the company that owns the top model (for example Google or Anthropic); Kalshi names the model family (for example Gemini or Claude). They ask essentially the same question, but because the names differ we show them in separate tables. Each price is the cost of a share that pays $1 if that company or model is ranked first at the check time.

The nearer checks

Both venues also run shorter markets that settle at the end of a month or week. These react fastest to new model releases:

How these markets settle

• Polymarket‘s year-end market resolves to the company whose model has the highest rank on the LMArena text leaderboard, with style control off, when it’s checked at 12:00 p.m. ET on December 31, 2026. Ties on rank are broken by Arena score.
• Kalshi resolves to the model ranked first on December 31, 2026, also with style control removed. Ties are broken by Arena score, then by number of votes, then by which model was released first.

Rules as published on each market, checked October 2026. Monthly markets can use slightly different settings, such as excluding models marked “AutoEval”, so read each market’s rules.

What moves these odds

• New releases. A new frontier model can appear on the leaderboard soon after launch, and the market reprices as its first votes come in.
• Preliminary scores. New entries often start with fewer votes and wider error bars, so their rank can shift for a while.
• Timing. A launch rumoured for just after the check date doesn’t count. Traders watch release calendars closely near month-end.
• Leaderboard methodology. Changes to how the leaderboard ranks or filters models can move the result as much as a new model.

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