Five AIs predict the World Cup

The World Cup rolls around every four years, and with it the office sweepstake, the ritual where everyone gets handed a team at random and pretends to care how it does. I have no interest in football (I had to read a beginner’s guide to how it all works just to follow what’s going on), and I definitely don’t know enough to make an informed prediction of my own. So I thought I’d hand the job to five AI models instead, get them to commit their predictions in public, and keep score. The result is AIWC26, a page that shows every group-stage prediction from five models side by side, scores them against the real results as they come in, and ranks the models in a league table. It looks like Ceefax, because of course it does. The setup Each model got an identical prompt. Here are the 72 group-stage fixtures, predict every scoreline, consider historical World Cup performance, recent form, squad make-up and venue factors, and return strict JSON. The AI entrants were Claude Fable 5 and Claude…