The ARC Prize 2026 - ARC-AGI-3 is a competition focused on creating AI capable of fluid intelligence. The goal is to build systems that learn and adapt to novel, human-solvable tasks they have never seen before, advancing AI's ability to learn new skills efficiently.
Real intelligence is defined not by memorizing answers, but by knowing what to do when the problem changes. While today's AI systems excel at their training data, they often struggle with unfamiliar situations. This competition evaluates true generalization: whether a system can quickly learn new skills in unfamiliar environments. Unlike benchmarks that reward pattern recognition on known tasks, ARC-AGI-3 uses an evaluation environment where tasks take place in hidden, interactive settings requiring exploration and multi-step reasoning. Participants must develop approaches that learn quickly, generalize well, and solve problems never encountered before.
Evaluation Scores for individual games range from 0% to 100%. A score of 100% represents an agent matching human-level performance by beating every game while matching the number of actions humans took. Scores are capped at 100%, even if an agent theoretically exceeds this by using fewer moves. The final score is the average of individual game scores across levels.
Timeline - Start Date: March 25, 2026 - Milestone 1 (Optional): June 30, 2026 - Milestone 2 (Optional): September 30, 2026 - Entry Deadline: October 26, 2026 - Team Merger Deadline: October 26, 2026 - Final Submission Deadline: November 2, 2026 - Winners Announcement: December 4, 2026
Prizes Total prizes available amount to $850,000, split between Progress Prizes ($150,000) and a Bonus Prize ($700,000). To be eligible for any prize, participants must open source their solutions.
Code Requirements Submissions must be made through Notebooks. Conditions for submission include: - CPU Notebook run-time ≤ 9 hours - GPU Notebook run-time ≤ 9 hours - Internet access disabled - Freely & publicly available external data (including pre-trained models) is allowed. - Submission files are automatically generated.