Who ends 2026 with the #1 AI model, OpenAI, Google or xAI?

Anthropic holds first, second, and third place on the leaderboard that settles this market, and seven of the top ten. However, Anthropic is not one of the 14 companies you can bet on.

So what is actually for sale is which model can overthrow the king. OpenAI costs 34 cents, Google 20, xAI 13, Alibaba 13. Owning all four costs 80 cents and pays a dollar if any one of them is ranked first on December 31, which is a 25% return over 135 days.

To be clear, according to the rules, these models don't even need to be at the top for long. Even a single night before December 31 is enough.

Alibaba's Qwen3.8-max already sits eighth at 1491, 15 points behind Anthropic's 1506. Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash is ninth at 1490.

Are there any risks? Yes, absolutely. Anthropic is genuinely ahead and shows no sign of slipping. Seven of the ten seats above Google belong to it, so catching up is passing a wall of them. OpenAI at 34 cents is the weakest leg of the four and the most expensive one, sitting seventeenth at 1482 on nothing but reputation.

Nonetheless, a basket of OpenAI, Google, xAI and Alibaba at 80 cents is a far safer way to hold this than backing a single name. And for 13 cents more you can add the company that is actually closest to the throne. Meta spent 2025 being written off, then went closed this year with Muse Spark, its first model not released as open weights, and has shipped two revisions of it since. All three sit inside the top 13. Muse Spark 1.2 is fourth at 1498, eight points off Anthropic and ahead of everything Google and Alibaba have on the board, and it costs the same 13 cents as xAI, which is 20 places further back.