Grok Is The Worst Mainstream Chatbot At Sports Betting, Says Research

Grok Is the Worst Mainstream Chatbot at Sports Betting, Says Research

Last updated: 2026/04/12 at 12:55 PM

News Room Published 12 April 2026

X’s chatbot Grok may have proved its ability to give hot takes on Nazi Germany or put almost anything in a bikini, but there’s one area that new research has found it majorly underperforming compared to its rivals: predicting sports results.

According to a report by AI start-up General Reasoning, first shared with The Financial Times, Grok performed the worst out of eight widely used large language models when it came to predicting and betting on the results of the 2023–24 Premier League season, the world’s most popular soccer league.

Eight LLMs were fed detailed historical data and statistics about each team and previous games. The LLMs were then told to build models that would maximize returns and manage risk when placing bets. Each LLM was given three tries at running the simulation, and a $133,000 (£100,000) pot to place bets with.

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 did the best of any chatbot tested, losing 11.0% on average over its three tries and ending with an average pot of £89,035.

X’s Grok, in contrast, lost all its money on one attempt and failed to complete its tasks on the next two attempts, finishing with an average final pot of zero. OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 also turned in a respectable, though still losing, performance. GPT-5.4 lost 13.6% on average, ending with a final average pot of $116,000 (£86,365). However, its worst try, where it lost 31.6%, was worse than any of Claude’s. Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro recorded worse overall performance but with high variability, losing 43.3% on average, but returning 33.7% on its best attempt.

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The authors of the paper found, in general, that AI was “systematically underperforming humans” in its testing. Meanwhile, Ross Taylor, General Reasoning’s chief executive, said that despite the hype around AI automation, there is currently “not a lot of measurement of putting AI into a long-term horizon setting,” highlighting how a lot of current testing occurs in “very static environments” that don’t reflect the complexity of real life.

The news comes as Grok may soon see more corporate adoption, with xAI’s owner, Elon Musk, reportedly forcing banks working on the upcoming SpaceX IPO to subscribe to the tool.