Which AI model is best? Big chess battle between top engines to decide

A new and exciting tournament is being held to find out which AI model is the best at playing chess. The event is being organised by Kaggle Game Arena in partnership with Google DeepMind. It is called the AI Chess Exhibition Tournament, and is being held from August 5 to August 7.

This special tournament will feature eight popular Large Language Models (LLMs) from top companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more. These models are not made for chess, but for other things like coding, writing, and answering questions. However, they now face each other on the chessboard.

The competing AIs and format

The tournament will follow a knockout format, which means one loss and the model is out. Based on how they play, the AIs will be ranked, and the results will be shared on Chess.com and on Kaggle. American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura is also covering the event on his Twitch handle.

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AI Chess Exhibition Tournament Day 1 results

Day 1 of the Kaggle AI Chess Tournament saw dominant performances, with four models, OpenAI o4 mini, OpenAI o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 4, cruising into the semifinals with identical 4-0 wins.

OpenAI’s models impressed early, as both o4 mini and o3 swept past DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi K2 Instruct respectively. On the other side of the bracket, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro outplayed Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4, while xAI’s Grok 4 defeated Gemini 2.5 Flash in a surprise result.

In the semifinals on August 6, o4 mini will face o3, and Gemini 2.5 Pro will lock horns against Grok 4. The gold-medal match and bronze-medal match will be held on August 7.

In 2017, Google's famous AI model AlphaZero shocked the world when it learned chess in just 4 hours and beat Stockfish, which is considered the world’s best chess engine. But unlike AlphaZero, the current models are not made for chess as they are general-purpose language models.

However, it will still be an interesting tournament to watch, as it will provide an answer to which AI model is the best at chess.