Year-end AI model odds: Google Edges Past Anthropic on Polymarket

Year-end AI model odds have turned into a two-horse photo finish. Polymarket's "Which company has best AI model end of 2026?" market had Google near 43% and Anthropic near 41.5% at 06:03 UTC on October 9. A week ago Anthropic was the clear favorite. The race now hangs on one leaderboard snapshot on New Year's Eve.

What actually happened

The flip happened fast. Shattered.io reports that on October 7 the same year-end market showed Anthropic at 49% and Google at 43%. By Friday morning, Google had edged ahead.

DeFiRate tracked a similar move with a slightly different window: Google at 43% and Anthropic at 41%, with Google up 3 points over a week and Anthropic down 12. Polymarket's built-in weekly change at our snapshot showed Google up about 6.5 points and Anthropic down about 11. Different timestamps produce different deltas, so we list both.

The shorter-term market shows the same direction but bigger. The "best AI model end of October" market priced Google near 69.7% and Anthropic near 25.5% at the same snapshot, after Anthropic dropped about 12 points in a week.

What Polymarket thinks

On the year-end market, "Will Google have the best AI model at the end of December 2026?" traded near 43%, with a bid around 42% and an ask around 44%. Anthropic sat near 41.5%, OpenAI near 6.5%, Meta near 2% and xAI near 1.5%.

The event has traded about $2.36 million in total and about $27,000 in the past 24 hours. That's decent depth for an AI market, but still small enough that a big trader can shift prices by a point or two.

Watch for duplicate markets too. Shattered.io notes that a separate Polymarket contract on the "#1 AI model end of December" showed Google at 40% and Anthropic at 39% when it checked. Similar wording doesn't guarantee similar prices.

One leaderboard, one timestamp, millions in bets.

How the market resolves

Resolution uses the "Rank" column on the LMArena text leaderboard with style control turned off, checked at 12:00 pm ET on December 31, 2026. If models tie on rank, the rules break the tie with Arena score, including unrounded values.

That's a very specific target. It's not about benchmarks, revenue or vibes. It's about which company's model sits on top of a crowd-voted chat ranking at a single moment. A surprise release in late December could flip everything.

Why Google is gaining

The obvious catalyst is Google's newest frontier model. We covered Gemini 4 Argon when it landed, and the October market suggests traders expect Google to hold the top spot through month end.

Anthropic still has plenty of weapons. Its Claude Opus 5.5 release kept it in the race, and a long gap until December 31 leaves room for at least one more release cycle from every major lab. That's why year-end prices sit much closer than the October ones.

What could flip it again

The long tail tells you where traders see surprise risk. Meta sits near 2%, xAI near 1.5%, and Alibaba, Moonshot, Z.ai and DeepSeek each trade under 1%. Those are cheap bets on someone shipping a model that tops the crowd vote out of nowhere.

The resolution setting matters too. Style control off means raw rankings, without the adjustment that discounts long or heavily formatted answers. A model that writes flashier replies could do better in that view than in the default one.

Treat the gap between the October and year-end markets as a time premium. Traders think Google leads now but see real odds of a reshuffle before the year ends. OpenAI's roughly 6.5% reflects doubt, not zero chance.

Our earlier October model odds piece showed how fast these markets reprice on a single release. Expect the same here when the next big model drops.

What to do as a reader

Check the LMArena leaderboard yourself with style control off before reacting to headlines, since that's what the market actually uses. Note the timestamp on every price you see. A screenshot from three days ago may already be stale.

If you trade year-end AI model odds, think in scenarios: new releases, leaderboard methodology changes and ties. Keep size small, because one launch event can move prices 10 points overnight. Nothing here is investment advice.