Best AI at the End of 2026: It's Not ChatGPT by a Long Shot, According to Prediction Market Bettors

The artificial intelligence race is heating up, with companies like Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Dario Amodei’s Anthropic and Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google Gemini fighting for the top spot.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have unveiled several features, Anthropic’s Claude is leading the race according to prediction markets.

Here’s What Prediction Market Is Saying

Data from Kalshi, a federally authorized betting platform, shows that over $7.6 million has been bet on the contract "Best AI at the end of 2026?"

Bettors have placed a 65.2% probability that Claude will emerge as the best AI at the end of 2026, up by 2.7%. ChatGPT comes in second with a probability of 14.6% and Gemini is third with a probability of 10.2%.

Disclaimer: Kalshi and Benzinga have an existing data collaboration agreement.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5

Anthropic last week launched Opus 5, the company’s latest artificial intelligence model, which it says delivers major improvements in software engineering, business automation and scientific research.

The company has highlighted software engineering as its biggest improvement, claiming that the Opus 5 offers double the performance of Opus 4.8 on Frontier-Bench while lowering the cost per task.

OpenAI’s AI Infrastructure Push

Nvidia is reportedly considering backing $250 billion in financing to support OpenAI’s massive AI infrastructure expansion. The funding is part of a massive data center project in southern Ohio, which could cost more than $500 billion.

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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