World’s top chatbots compete in first-ever AI chess tournament

The event, taking place from Aug. 5–7, is being held in collaboration with Google DeepMind, Chess.com, Norwegian grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, and chess streamer Levy Rozman, with matches and expert commentary livestreamed throughout, TechSpot reported.

Participants include OpenAI’s o3 and 04-mini, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4, xAI’s Grok 4, DeepSeek-R1, and Moonshot’s Kimi 2-K2-Instruct.

The models are competing in a single-elimination bracket, with each matchup played in a best-of-four format, beginning with the quarterfinals and concluding in a championship round.

Following the tournament, Kaggle will maintain a continuously updated leaderboard with Elo-like rankings, a system that calculates relative skill levels based on win-loss outcomes, to track model performance over time.

A chess board. Photo from Pexels

"This will give the public a clear way to see which AI is the best at chess," Chess.com stated.

The platform is intended to highlight how LLMs evolve in their strategic capabilities. Many current models, including ChatGPT and Gemini, are estimated to play at the level of amateur players.

In July, Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top-rated chess player, revealed on X that he had defeated ChatGPT in an online match, winning in 53 moves without losing a single piece, according to Time Magazine.

Chess was chosen for the inaugural showcase because it remains unsolved by AI, according to Google. While the models may not exhibit top-tier playing strength, they are capable of providing explanations for their moves, which, Google said, allows observers to "move beyond static scores to see how AI truly performs in a dynamic, competitive environment."

Kaggle stated that the initiative aims to provide insight into how AI models reason and their potential in complex decision-making tasks.