The AI chess tournament took place on Google-owned platform Kaggle, which allows data scientists to evaluate their systems through competitions.
Eight large language models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, as well as chinese developers DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, battled against each other during Kaggle’s three day tournament.
AI developers use tests known as benchmarks to examine their models’ skills in areas such as reasoning or coding.
As complex rule-based, strategy games, chess and Go have often been used to assess a model’s ability to learn how to best achieve a certain outcome – in this case, outmaneuvering opponents to win.
AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s AI lab DeepMind to play the Chinese two-player strategy game Go, claimed a series of victories against human Go champions in the late 2010s.
South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol retired after several defeats by AlphaGo in 2019.
“There is an entity that cannot be defeated,” he told the Yonhap news agency.
Sir Demis Hassabis, one of DeepMind’s co-founders, is himself a former chess prodigy.
Meanwhile in the late 1990s, chess champions were pitted against powerful computers.