AI forecasting system beats every human competitor in Metaculus tournament

An AI forecasting system developed by London startup Mantic has outperformed every human participant in a competition predicting political, economic and cultural events.

Mantic finished ahead of all human forecasters in the Summer 2026 Metaculus Cup and was beaten by only one other AI system.

Reuters reports that it was the first Metaculus tournament in which AI systems dominated the competition.

Mantic has now raised $25 million as it develops the technology for use by businesses, governments and financial institutions.

Predicting probabilities

Forecasting tournaments ask competitors to assign probabilities to uncertain future events rather than simply predicting whether something will or will not happen.

Mantic specialises frontier AI models for this type of probabilistic forecasting.

The company says one advantage of its system is its ability to avoid the herd behaviour that can influence human forecasters.

In one example, Mantic assigned a higher probability than the human consensus to Abelardo De La Espriella winning Colombia’s presidential election. He subsequently won.

The Summer 2026 Metaculus Cup covered questions across politics, economics, technology and culture, with forecasts scored according to their accuracy.

Mantic’s performance does not mean the system can reliably predict arbitrary future events.

Its result is specific to the forecasting questions, rules and scoring system used in the competition.

But the company is targeting applications where organisations already rely on people to estimate the likelihood of uncertain outcomes.

Reuters reports that governments, companies, hedge funds and trading firms have shown interest in the technology, although Mantic has not identified its customers.

The new $25 million funding round will support further development as the company looks to turn its tournament performance into a commercial forecasting product.

AI systems have already demonstrated their ability to generate text, images, software and research.

The Metaculus result tests another capability: assigning probabilities to what happens next.

Sources

• Reuters – Mantic forecasting performance and $25 million funding round
• Metaculus – Summer 2026 Metaculus Cup