The tournament saw models from Anthropic, Google, xAI and DeepSeek compete against each other to be crowned the top AI chess player.

Know how OpenAI's AI model defeated Elon Musk's Grok in a recent AI chess tournament, exploring the capabilities of modern large language models in strategic games.

Elon Musk downplayed the loss, calling Grok’s earlier strong performance a “side effect” and stating that xAI had “spent almost no effort on chess.” The match result adds another public layer to the rivalry between Musk’s xAI and OpenAI, co-founded by individuals who once worked together.

Chess is a window into how well an AI can plan, evaluate options, avoid catastrophic mistakes, and stay logically consistent. If Grok throws away a queen because it doesn’t grasp long-term consequences, what might it do in a legal document, or when booking travel?

OpenAI’s o3 has defeated xAI’s Grok in a chess match that took place on Google’s Kaggle platform. But what does it prove?

World number one chess player Magnus Carlsen estimated Grok’s rating at approximately 800 and OpenAI’s model at around 1200, significantly below his own peak rating.