Which Company Will Have the Best AI Model at the End of 2029?

The race to build the best AI model is still wide open, and the competition is fierce.

New releases keep changing the leaderboard, with companies competing across different skills, including coding, research, and reasoning. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic lead the pack, while Mistral, Meta, Z AI, MiniMax, and DeepSeek also have a say in the increasingly crowded tech field.

Kalshi’s long-term market takes this ongoing competition to the end of the decade, asking traders to forecast which company will have the best AI model by the end of 2029. The outcome will be verified using the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index first, with Epoch AI and LiveBench used as backups.

With December 31, 2029 still years away, the market is still young, and the race is far from settled.

How Kalshi Will Decide Which AI Model Is Best at the End of the Decade

Kalshi launched its “Best LLM at the end of the decade?” market on October 8, 2026. In less than a month, the market recorded about $4,300 in trading volume, so it’s still a relatively low-volume, high-volatility market.

As of October 29, Kalshi traders gave Essential AI a 24% chance of having the best AI model at the end of 2029, followed by Anthropic at 19%, Google at 12%, and xAI at 11%. The chances will inevitably change in the months and years to come as the AI field develops.

The market features a long list of other companies, including Meta, MiniMax, Essential AI, Mistral, Thinking Machines, Upstage, Prime Intellect, Inception, Safe Superintelligence, Reflection AI, Arcee AI, xAI, and DeepSeek. Others on the list include Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, China Mobile, Cohere, Huawei, Institute of Foundation Models, InclusionAI, LG AI Research, LongCat, Moonshot, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and StepFun.

It’s important to note that only one company from the long list can resolve to Yes. The market’s outcome depends on which company has the highest-ranked AI model on December 31, 2029, at 10 a.m. ET, when the market closes.

The outcome will be verified by the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index first. If this cannot determine the result, Kalshi will use Epoch AI’s General ECI, followed by LiveBench Overall. Only the ranking at the specified time counts, meaning a company leading earlier in the year won’t qualify.

The rules note that projected payouts will be issued on January 7, 2030, at 10:30 a.m. ET. This means that Kalshi traders have more than three years to make their selection.

Other Tech Markets to Explore on Kalshi

Tech prediction markets are quite popular at Kalshi. They feature shorter-term AI and technology forecasts alongside its decade-long LLM market. Its “Best AI at the end of 2026?” market has exceeded $16 million in trading volume, with Gemini at 46.1% and Claude close behind at 44.8%.

Other markets track which AI model will first reach 1,550 on Text Arena and the weekly market share for Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Google.

These markets also cover a broad range of other tech-related topics, such as how many launches SpaceX will make in a given month, how many people will have Neuralink implanted by the end of the year, the number of data centers that will be built, and more.

To learn more about how Kalshi holds up compared to other similar platforms, explore our list of prediction markets.