Document your conceptual approach for the ARC Prize 2026.
Real intelligence isn’t about memorizing answers - it’s knowing what to do when the problem changes. Build systems that learn and adapt to novel, human-solvable tasks they’ve never seen before and advance AI’s ability to learn new skills efficiently.
Note: there are three active competitions for ARC in 2026: ARC-AGI-3, ARC-AGI-2, and this paper track, where you can document your approach for either one of the prediction competitions.
Today’s AI systems excel at what they were trained to do, but often fall short when something unfamiliar comes along. Most benchmarks reward pattern recognition, not genuine problem-solving. The ARC Prize focuses on true generalization: whether a system can quickly learn new skills in unfamiliar situations. Instead of rewarding pattern recognition on known tasks, it evaluates how well systems can adapt to new problems they’ve never encountered before. The evaluation environment is designed so systems can't just memorize solutions. Tasks take place in hidden, interactive environments that require exploration and multi-step reasoning.
In this competition, you’ll build AI systems that adapt on the fly to new tasks in the ARC environment, and develop approaches that learn quickly, generalize well, and solve problems never seen before.
To participate in the ARC Prize 2026 Paper Track, you need to submit a Writeup where you document the submission that you provided for either ARC-AGI-2 or ARC-AGI-3. Your solution could help move AI closer to systems that learn the way people do: flexible, efficient, and able to handle new challenges.
The real test of intelligence begins when the problem changes.
All deadlines are at 11:59 PM UTC on the corresponding day unless otherwise noted. The competition organizers reserve the right to update the contest timeline if they deem it necessary.
A valid submission must contain the following:
The Kaggle Writeup serves as your project report. This should include a title, subtitle, and a detailed analysis of your submission to ARC-AGI-2 or ARC-AGI-3. Your Writeup should not exceed 1,500 words. Submissions over this limit may be subject to penalty.
Submissions for Paper Awards are evaluated equally across the following six criteria. Each criterion is scored on a scale from 0 (lowest) to 5 (highest), with the final score calculated as the average of all six.
The Paper Award will be awarded to three Submissions with the most points.
This competition has only one track.
Papers that score above 4.5/5 on the paper rubric qualify for a bonus prize of $375,000. If multiple papers score above 4.5/5, the total prize pool will be divided equally among all.